Internet Wanderings

Some places I have roamed on the Internet highway...
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The Clockwork Pastor reminds us that Jesus is not a fashion accessory. I think this is what has unsettled me concerning Moss' post.  When I read the text, the sense that I get from it is that faith, church, God are all optional, they are luxury goods.  Bling.

Mead is correct in stating that we will not have a vital Liberal Protestantism so long as it views faith as just one choice among many.  Our evangelical sisters and brothers have their issues, but they seem to get that this whole Jesus thing matters.  Which is why evangelicalism isn't suffering the same collapse that mainline churches are facing (they are seeing their numbers fall, but that decline is not as steep and began rather recently), they know that church is not just a fashion accessory, but it is vital to their lives, vital to a sense of who they are and vital to all creation.

It's time that we stop treating the faith optional.  It has to matter.  Otherwise, we should just give up.

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The connection between Alzheimer's and diet. The implications of this report are profound. While the correlation of dementia risk, and specifically Alzheimer's disease, with diabetes has been established, this new finding throws a much wider net in terms of defining an at risk population for an incurable brain disorder. But despite the potential public health impact of these findings, this correlation received almost no media attention.
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Indeed, John Byron... you can't make this stuff up. Scapegoat? Yep... there's an app for that. The passage of scripture and the ceremony it describes is among the more oddest one in the Bible.  How a wandering goat removes the sin from the community is not clear, although it is probably more symbolic in nature. We are not certain how often this ceremony was practiced in ancient Israel. While the Day of Atonement is still celebrated by Jews around the world, I am not aware of any that include the ritual of the scapegoat.

But now we can bring back that ritual through the magic of technology. In a recent article The Jewish Week reports that a company has designed an eGoat app that can be used for private confession of sins. Go to eScapegoat.com, select your age range, type in your confession and then hit enter. On Yom Kippur the eGoat will be driven into the wilderness of the internet and your sins will be taken with it.
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Social media and the dying process--  Death has now been able to make its way back into the conversation, he believes, thanks to "the narcissism of the self-esteem movement"-- our culture's growing enthusiasm for sharing personal information, which opens "a very rare window into a forbidden dimension of life, which makes death part of everyday experience," he says.

"People are very out and proud about their illnesses," says Christian Sinclair, a hospice and palliative medicine doctor who co-founded the end-of-life care tweetchat #HPM. "Even before we had social media, we were beginning to see the story lines of 'I have cancer and this is what it's like to go through the treatments.' Social media encourages a lot more of that."
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Jamie White on life being like a bicycle-- Lately I have been contemplating some life choices. I look around at my peers and see their drive for worldly success, yet I also see how quickly this focus can become the demise of their emotional life.  What is it about our society that pushes us to work long hours?  Why do we feel the pressure to own nice things?

Leaving the dollar bills behind, I've been focusing more on days off work for adventure rather than loading up my bank account.  Having a day off with Dustin means a happier Jamie (typically).  I've slowly come to the realization that when we can spend the day - not worrying about church or work or school - together, it makes all the difference.  Clearing the mind, usually by riding our bicycles, is the best medicine for emotional distress.

Focusing on the experiences-- not the things.