Category Archives: christianity
Arts in The Church
A Question of Quality vs Participation
I was talking with a friend of mine the other day about how art in the church ought to work. That’s not really true–it wasn’t really about art, per se, but about the issue of quality. How important is it that we do things with professional-grade quality? This applies directly to art, of course, and honestly, [...]
Labor in a Post-Scarcity World?
A few days ago, Tycho posed this question on his blog: What does labor look like in a mostly/quasi post-scarcity world? I don’t have the answer to this question, but I’m really curious about the answer. As usual, this is what makes open source so fascinating–rather than fight or try to sidestep the idea that [...]
Design as a Paradigm for Justice and Economics
Imagining Beyond Capitalism
Troy S has a good blog post about revolutionary design. His major argument is that we need more imaginative design, particularly in the F/LOSS world. He writes: It cannot be stressed enough that what seems like an obvious iteration to go from plain bitmapped font layouts to WYSIWYG editing was, in fact, a revolutionary idea [...]
Announcing Open Source Drum Loops
for worship - a new blog
I’m launching a new blog today–I’m finally taking my own advice and creating a blog that’s particularly niche. The new blog is Open Source Drum Loops for Worship. Since our drummer at church moved on to other things, I decided it was time to start playing the laptop and working on the tension between the [...]
The Inner Torment of Being A Linux User
or How Linux Is Like Protestantism
Ivanka from the Ubuntu Design Team twittered a hysterical link about the difference between Mac and PCs recently. It was an old article, from 1994 or some such, so they compared Mac to DOS, which is funny to start with. Of course, you can substitute “Windows” or even better, “Linux,” for DOS in this context. [...]
Calling Creative Risks ‘Good’
I read, today, an excerpt from a book called Nurturing Artists in your Local Church by a guy named Joshua Banner. This line stuck out to me: We simply need to be curious and demonstrate that we believe what artists are doing is important—to call their creative risks “good” just as the Creator blessed his own [...]
Open Worship and Trust
I read this article last night about the Quaker practice of open worship, which as far as I can tell is mostly sitting around without having anything planned and letting the congregation speak/lead/sing at will. I like this idea a lot, mostly because I feel like the times I’ve had the best worship experiences (and by [...]
Art and Incarnation
Here’s a good article about art and incarnation, basically arguing that art works because it’s not gnostic: it doesn’t reject the world, but rather reveals what’s really true about the world through concrete, experienceable things. The article concludes: The artist does not show us the world as it ought to be; she shows us the world [...]
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Discussion on the Kingdom of God
A few days ago, my brother (who just became the father of twins!) emailed me in response to my (initially negative) review of McLaren’s Everything Must Change. He took issue with McLaren’s kingdom theology, saying, “McLaren seems to define the Kingdom of God according to his own definition, which I don’t fully understand, but which [...]
Marxists Blogs
and a critique of our assumptions