"They tend to be, each in their own way, orthodox, conservative, traditional clergy, intellectuals or believers, but that very authentic inner experience and membership allows them to utterly critique the very systems that they are a part of."
Life on the Edge, a blog entry by Fr. Richard Rohr.
-courtesy of Peter Gent
Monday, April 4, 2011
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Mariology
A genuine question: how do Roman Catholic theologians view these verses?
" 27While he was saying these things, some woman lifted her voice above the murmur of the crowd: "Blessed the womb that carried you, and the breasts at which you nursed!"
" 27While he was saying these things, some woman lifted her voice above the murmur of the crowd: "Blessed the womb that carried you, and the breasts at which you nursed!"
28Jesus commented, "Even more blessed are those who hear God's Word and guard it with their lives!" (Luke 11:27-28).
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Gathered writings
Dear friends;
As I've mentioned before, I am now writing weekly devotional/reflection entries over at The Embassy Blog, on the official website for the young adults ministry of the Beijing International Christian Fellowship. My friends Phil and Billy are also contributing to the blog: Phil is answering questions about the Bible and the Christian life, and Billy is doing various entries on the Christian life. We'd love for you to go on over and take a look!
For the last few pieces, I've been writing reflections on the Book of Mark, which Phil and I have been reading through in February.
Who Are My Mother and Brothers? - who are we giving influence in our lives?
Responding to Jesus - what were people's responses to Jesus' presence?
Oh, To Be Clean! - how do we respond to the circumstances around us?
Big Hopes and Small Hopes - what do we rely on to give us hope?
As I've mentioned before, I am now writing weekly devotional/reflection entries over at The Embassy Blog, on the official website for the young adults ministry of the Beijing International Christian Fellowship. My friends Phil and Billy are also contributing to the blog: Phil is answering questions about the Bible and the Christian life, and Billy is doing various entries on the Christian life. We'd love for you to go on over and take a look!
For the last few pieces, I've been writing reflections on the Book of Mark, which Phil and I have been reading through in February.
Who Are My Mother and Brothers? - who are we giving influence in our lives?
Responding to Jesus - what were people's responses to Jesus' presence?
Oh, To Be Clean! - how do we respond to the circumstances around us?
Big Hopes and Small Hopes - what do we rely on to give us hope?
Monday, February 7, 2011
New devotional blog for work
Dear friends;
I am pleased to announce that my young adults' group at the Beijing International Christian Fellowship is launching a new blog, with weekly contributions from myself and another friend or two. Please direct your browsers or RSS feeds to http://www.bicf.org/theembassyblog, and I hope you enjoy!
-jglc
I am pleased to announce that my young adults' group at the Beijing International Christian Fellowship is launching a new blog, with weekly contributions from myself and another friend or two. Please direct your browsers or RSS feeds to http://www.bicf.org/theembassyblog, and I hope you enjoy!
-jglc
Sunday, December 12, 2010
I want...
...to give more than I thought was possible.
...to give my life to a cause that most people think is beneath me.
...to care enough to let myself be hurt.
...to cry, to hunger, to be meek, to love peace, to be disliked enough that this applies to me.
...to believe that Love will not only always win, but has already won.
...to have hope that not only helps me live, but changes what I understand living to be.
...to give my life to a cause that most people think is beneath me.
...to care enough to let myself be hurt.
...to cry, to hunger, to be meek, to love peace, to be disliked enough that this applies to me.
...to believe that Love will not only always win, but has already won.
...to have hope that not only helps me live, but changes what I understand living to be.
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Information, the Internet, and Education.
I'm sitting here at 2:20 AM, lazing about as I browse the Internet, realizing the seductive - perilous, even - nature of content.
That is to say: we find ourselves in an age where opinions, media, art - entertainment - is available in gross quantities (numerically and repulsively gross) never before imagined. I can easily lose myself in entire afternoons spent, one after the other, non-selectively feeding off the vast streams of information pouring out of the global system. Poring over entire ecosystems of wikipedia entries, examining the output of a single youtube figure, simply perched at twitter.com/#home continuously refreshing the figurative timestream of minutiae.
But what does this mean? I was raised to believe that education meant learning more about what is. As a youth, posted on the couch - legs crossed, neck bent - I perused the Worldbook Encyclopedia, egged on in my erudition by eager parents. I was told that knowing more about my world would render me better-equipped to engage with it.
But that was a different era; a time when information was scarce, valuable. I had entire classroom sessions about the Dewey Decimal System; we were inculcated with the view of library qua gateway to the world, where a handful of rooms - curated and organized by hand - served as world-by-proxy: the sum total of human knowledge and experience gathered, summed up, ordered and described. At such a time, it was quite possible to exhaust one's storehouse of information on any given topic: if I wanted to read about, say, the role of samurai in 19th-century Japan (and I did!), there were n books on said topic available to me. And n was often less than 15.
But were I a young lad in today's bazaar of inputs, I find a humanly inexhaustible resource. Simply googling "samurai" + "19th-century japan" returns over four hundred thousand page hits, from fanboyish (there's another word that didn't exist!) gushings to graduate-level research on primary sources. The new information generated and instantly available, on a daily basis, long outpaces my ability to take it in.
The ramifications of this are, to my mind, vast: acquiring more information is no longer a talent or skillset; anyone with a 5-year-old sidekick and a $50 data plan can do that. In this world of infinite content and global context, information is cheap: what is highly valuable is the skill of adjudicating between streams of content. What is pertinent - what is credible?
And, most importantly: how can this information be repurposed? Were I to simply become a living repository of, say, humanity's knowledge as pertains to a subgenre of early-2000s electronic music, or Civil War reenacting, or a certain type of cross-stitching technique, this is insufficient raison d'etre. Where does this information go? The $64,000 question is - to what end is this knowledge being directed?
Whether we do it through a twitter account, wordpress blog (sorry, blogspot...), youtube channel, indie music distribution, or other mode of expression, the word of the age is productivity. To use a business-centric buzzword: what is the value added to the end consumer by my step in the process? This is why we see old-world names like Virgin Megastores and Fat Beats rapidly disappearing: if animals roam free in the streets, then why go to a zoo? If information is widely and freely accessible in the internet, why go through a middleman?
The metaphor provides its own answer: Because a zoo tiger is a beautiful, serene creature, while a street tiger is a terrifying beast. Zoos provide stable, credible, curated environments for interacting with animals that would otherwise tear one's head off. This explains why blogs have evolved into the tastemakers of our time: whereas before the local snobby record store would provide an auteur's-eye-view of "the scene," now Nah Right, Pitchfork, and that cool girl from school's twitter feed do so.
(1) People need guidance.
but
(2) People don't like paying money.
And so we have replaced the MSRP mark-up of Virgin with the ease of an RSS feed coupled with the cost-free nature of a bittorrent client.
This is not without ramifications. And the most obvious, in my eyes, is that those of us who are "wired-in" (to a certain degree) are rapidly becoming information zombies - shambling through the streets groaning "information.... informationnnnn..."
With such vast quantities of input, and much of it even checking in at a high quality, it is far too easy for us to become consumers only. I could spend evenings, days, weeks even just arming myself with information, paralyzed by the sheer volume, carried away like a hapless duckling in the surge of a fire hose (just go with the metaphor for now), and never even think to begin production. Both for the reason that, with so much content already existing in the wild, my two cents have fallen victim to massive inflation, as well as for the reason of it being simply easier to continue my unabated consumption rather than shift gears into the mode of critical assessment, energetic production, and - and this is key in the modern age of information - self-promotion.
The latter, perhaps, is a fitting coda to this screed: promotion. Marketing. Getting it - whatever it may be - into the right hands.
In the old days (which I am, likely, glorifying), with information comparatively scarce, promotion was as simple as announcing existence to the world. If a niche was filled, if new (or, more likely, new to this audience) information was made available, its debut was as simple as providing access and letting a target demographic know about it. But now, with a surfeit of information, promotion has become far more complex: no matter what type of music, writing, video work, or other content one is creating, there are already people out there who have created something similar. Better. More well-liked. More established.
Promotion now is not just announcing existence; it must convey superiority. If the target audience's desire is already being fed by a media outlet, then advertising must convince that audience that this information, this version of what-I-already-have is better. More like what-I-want than what-I-already-have is.
Hm.
That is to say: we find ourselves in an age where opinions, media, art - entertainment - is available in gross quantities (numerically and repulsively gross) never before imagined. I can easily lose myself in entire afternoons spent, one after the other, non-selectively feeding off the vast streams of information pouring out of the global system. Poring over entire ecosystems of wikipedia entries, examining the output of a single youtube figure, simply perched at twitter.com/#home continuously refreshing the figurative timestream of minutiae.
But what does this mean? I was raised to believe that education meant learning more about what is. As a youth, posted on the couch - legs crossed, neck bent - I perused the Worldbook Encyclopedia, egged on in my erudition by eager parents. I was told that knowing more about my world would render me better-equipped to engage with it.
But that was a different era; a time when information was scarce, valuable. I had entire classroom sessions about the Dewey Decimal System; we were inculcated with the view of library qua gateway to the world, where a handful of rooms - curated and organized by hand - served as world-by-proxy: the sum total of human knowledge and experience gathered, summed up, ordered and described. At such a time, it was quite possible to exhaust one's storehouse of information on any given topic: if I wanted to read about, say, the role of samurai in 19th-century Japan (and I did!), there were n books on said topic available to me. And n was often less than 15.
But were I a young lad in today's bazaar of inputs, I find a humanly inexhaustible resource. Simply googling "samurai" + "19th-century japan" returns over four hundred thousand page hits, from fanboyish (there's another word that didn't exist!) gushings to graduate-level research on primary sources. The new information generated and instantly available, on a daily basis, long outpaces my ability to take it in.
The ramifications of this are, to my mind, vast: acquiring more information is no longer a talent or skillset; anyone with a 5-year-old sidekick and a $50 data plan can do that. In this world of infinite content and global context, information is cheap: what is highly valuable is the skill of adjudicating between streams of content. What is pertinent - what is credible?
And, most importantly: how can this information be repurposed? Were I to simply become a living repository of, say, humanity's knowledge as pertains to a subgenre of early-2000s electronic music, or Civil War reenacting, or a certain type of cross-stitching technique, this is insufficient raison d'etre. Where does this information go? The $64,000 question is - to what end is this knowledge being directed?
Whether we do it through a twitter account, wordpress blog (sorry, blogspot...), youtube channel, indie music distribution, or other mode of expression, the word of the age is productivity. To use a business-centric buzzword: what is the value added to the end consumer by my step in the process? This is why we see old-world names like Virgin Megastores and Fat Beats rapidly disappearing: if animals roam free in the streets, then why go to a zoo? If information is widely and freely accessible in the internet, why go through a middleman?
The metaphor provides its own answer: Because a zoo tiger is a beautiful, serene creature, while a street tiger is a terrifying beast. Zoos provide stable, credible, curated environments for interacting with animals that would otherwise tear one's head off. This explains why blogs have evolved into the tastemakers of our time: whereas before the local snobby record store would provide an auteur's-eye-view of "the scene," now Nah Right, Pitchfork, and that cool girl from school's twitter feed do so.
(1) People need guidance.
but
(2) People don't like paying money.
And so we have replaced the MSRP mark-up of Virgin with the ease of an RSS feed coupled with the cost-free nature of a bittorrent client.
This is not without ramifications. And the most obvious, in my eyes, is that those of us who are "wired-in" (to a certain degree) are rapidly becoming information zombies - shambling through the streets groaning "information.... informationnnnn..."
With such vast quantities of input, and much of it even checking in at a high quality, it is far too easy for us to become consumers only. I could spend evenings, days, weeks even just arming myself with information, paralyzed by the sheer volume, carried away like a hapless duckling in the surge of a fire hose (just go with the metaphor for now), and never even think to begin production. Both for the reason that, with so much content already existing in the wild, my two cents have fallen victim to massive inflation, as well as for the reason of it being simply easier to continue my unabated consumption rather than shift gears into the mode of critical assessment, energetic production, and - and this is key in the modern age of information - self-promotion.
The latter, perhaps, is a fitting coda to this screed: promotion. Marketing. Getting it - whatever it may be - into the right hands.
In the old days (which I am, likely, glorifying), with information comparatively scarce, promotion was as simple as announcing existence to the world. If a niche was filled, if new (or, more likely, new to this audience) information was made available, its debut was as simple as providing access and letting a target demographic know about it. But now, with a surfeit of information, promotion has become far more complex: no matter what type of music, writing, video work, or other content one is creating, there are already people out there who have created something similar. Better. More well-liked. More established.
Promotion now is not just announcing existence; it must convey superiority. If the target audience's desire is already being fed by a media outlet, then advertising must convince that audience that this information, this version of what-I-already-have is better. More like what-I-want than what-I-already-have is.
Hm.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
wisdom
"[Martin] Buber admired how the Hasidic communities actualized their religion in daily life and culture. In stark contrast to the busy Zionist organizations, which were always mulling political concerns, the Hasidim were focused on the values which Buber had long advocated for Zionism to adopt."
I think the parallels are evident.
I think the parallels are evident.
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