What We Can Say

On February 13th I posted regarding the complexities of language and the limits we have in conveying meaning. This should not discourage us though, once we have a better grasp of how language functions, we will find that we can say quite a lot.  My metaphor for meaning in the postmodern context is a painting. [...]

Faith Thinking: The Best Book You’re Never Heard Of

When John Franke (author of Beyond Foundationalism: Shaping Theology in a Postmodern Context and prof at Biblical Seminary) had to make a special order of Faith Thinking for his Theology I class, I was surprised. It had been one of the best books I had ever read on theology, and yet it was out [...]

Context, Media, and the Message

Check out this spoof trailer of Sleepless in Seattle: link.
While such creations are rather humorous and amazing in their display of creativity and ingenuity, they also illustrate an important aspect of media in today’s culture. You can essentially take a picture, sound clip, or video clip and make any image/statement mean whatever you want. It’s [...]

Media and Christianity

Tony Jones has a great post related to a new book The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture: How Media Shapes Faith, the Gospel, and Church, by Shane Hipps.
This is a project worth reviewing and possibly buying. Here is the introduction from his site:
There is a hidden force at work in our culture shaping our
life of [...]

Playing With Language

We continue our look at the postmodern world with the implications of postmodernism for how we talk about and use language. While the modern conception of language was more of a one to one representation, the postmodern idea of language is open to interpretation and muddies the water a bit.
In the postmodern world language is [...]

Moving

This little blog has been fun, but it was just a test to see how WordPress worked. Now that I’ve played with it a bit, I had my friend Todd Hiestand build a new site using WordPress.
The material will basically be the same, with non-profit business tips, features for Southern Vermont Non-Profits, and my writing. [...]

Volunteer Tips: I Already Sent in My Money . . .

I called a volunteer yesterday. After saying where I was calling from, she said, “Oh, I already sent in my money.” I wasn’t calling about that of course, I was calling to ask her to volunteer. Totally different department.
Yet in some ways, I feel like asking people to volunteer is more demanding than asking for [...]

Volunteer Recruiting Tip: A Friend of a Friend of a Friend

One of the best ways that I have found volunteers is through the friends of other volunteers. The obvious starting point is to make sure that your volunteers have positive experiences, know their opinions are valued, and feel appreciated. The next step is to encourage them to bring their friends along.
Incentives are a fun way [...]

Volunteer Appreciation Tip: Cookies and Chocolate

Knowing what your volunteers enjoy is a key part of appreciating them. It’s even worth adding a section to their profile in your database in order to keep track of such preferences as snacks, hobbies, etc.
For example, when volunteers come to help with a mailing, I always make sure to have cookies, crackers, and some [...]

Missionary Engagement With Culture

Christianity Today has an interesting article relating to the approach of missionaries when sharing the Gospel in another culture and its implications for us in our own context today.
Excerpt:Assuming they survive the initial contact (which no
one takes for granted anymore) the missionaries spend a great deal of
effort to learn the tribal language and culture. They [...]

PagePlus 1.0 Review

After using PagePlus for over a month, I’ve had some time to acquaint myself with its quirks and advantages.
Advantages:
It’s free! You can’t beat a free program that provides the flexibility you need to do all kinds of publishing. There are a number of free templates that you can download online. The layout options, though different [...]

Grappling with Postmodernism

ReToday I will continue to flesh out the philosophical postmodern movement that underlies our popular context today.  Some critique of postmodernism will be forthcoming, but for now I am trying to outline some of its features that are useful for the church today.
The emphasis on perspectives
among postmodern thinkers on one hand appears to be [...]

The Word “Postmodern”

Andrew Jones has some great thoughts on our use of the word Postmodern and how relevant it is for us today. Postmodernism is only of interest to me as far as it is the context in which we currently operate. Jones typically separates himself from philosophical postmodernism and prefers to interact with cultural postmodernism.
He [...]

Defining Postmodernism: Part One

It’s important to have a basic grasp of the influence of postmodernism on our culture today if we want to bring the Kingdom of God to our world.  While it is not essential that every Christian be able to parse out the subtle nuances of postmodern philosophy, there are importants trends and marks of the [...]

Open Source Updates

I’m working on adding some more open source links. Since I’m a mere beginner in the world of HTML, the formatting is a bit rough at some points, but all in all, it’s a fairly user-friendly page. The spacing was just a little crazy at times.
If you happen to know of any open source links, [...]