The Tea Party movement threatens to be a very big presence in the coming mid-term elections. The people at the rallies are true believers. They come at their own expense and wave homemade signs. Some slogans are really very clever. What you may not know is the gatherings are heavily sponsored by major corporate donors.
The project finally got far enough along that I could do something with it.
For years I’ve carried around tens of thousands of negatives and transparencies, the result of a career of writing stories and making photographs. But the digital world has so taken over photography that the real, silver-based stuff is all but dead. Soon it will be so far in the margins that any work of chemical photography will be proceeded by the ubiquitous and annoying word “artisan.” So if all those many thousands of images were to have any further life, they would need to be digitized.
Back when Open for Business started some nine years ago, the original purpose of this publication was not to put out original commentary on “the business of life,” but to blog about and link to useful information on Free Software. In 2010, everybody – and pretty much everything – has a blog, but over the years OFB has exited its category of genesis and taken up the mantle of the magazine. Why be a magazine in an age of blogs?
Jesus is how we say it in English, filtered through Greek and Latin. In Hebrew it's closer to Joshua. Same with the title Christ; it was Messiah. In any other language, whatever He is commonly called, none of it matters if He isn't living in the one who carries His name.
When did I turn into my grandfather? No, I haven’t gotten short and bald-headed, nor do I have a desire to come out of retirement and practice dentistry using a foot-pedal drill on relatives in a dimly lit basement, though this may be due to my never having been a dentist.
As we watch the death throes of Western Civilization, certain symptoms manifest prominently. As the electronic mesh expands and thickens, with fatter pipes and richer content, so does the shallowness of each connection within the mesh. We can surely speed up our ability to process incoming data, but it comes at the necessary expense of meaning. We know more, yet understand less.
Help me out here, because if it makes any sense I cannot see it. Last week I took a friend to the airport, and saw her pulled aside by three giggling — really — representatives of the “Transportation Security Administration” for secondary screening.
Up until a few short weeks ago, the name Terry Jones would have garnered blank stares from most quarters. Now, his back and forth plans to burn the Qur’an have elevated the obscure pastor into the most talked about clergyman of the season. Whether or not this burning or others like it actually proceed, those of us who claim to follow Christ must grapple with what people like Jones bring to the image of the Church and the Gospel.
When I heard didgeridoos, and people saying “G’day, mate,” I realized I’d dug deep enough but in the wrong place.
The Apostle John warned us the world would naturally hate us. It should then be no surprise that, as I have argued in my previous columns, the West’s way of looking at things might be less than ideal for understanding God and his will for us.