Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey talks about having a daily do and don’t list.
book: the Christ files
This book by John Dickson was recommended to a friend, so I thought I’d grab a copy and read through it. It’s a high-level summary of the non-Christian and Christian historical documents that point to the existence of Jesus.
Worth a read if you’re after an overview of the ancient evidence for the existence of Jesus. An easy 92 pages written by a well credentialed scholar.
Twig cafe, Surry Hills
Single Origin Roasters coffee. 357 Cleveland St, Surry Hills. Adjacent to a garden shop is this cafe – a mix of indoor and outdoor seating that’s busy for most of its opening time.
As you can see from the surrounds of the coffee machine, there’s a lot going on here. A mix of food offerings, flowers, knick-knacks, but still plenty of room to place orders at the counter and work the EFTPOS machine.
They’re keen on local, sustainable produce. While I’ve only tried the ham and cheese muffin thus far, it was well put together, and suggests that the remainder of the menu will be equally polished. There are certainly plenty of favourable reviews of their food online.
Coffee too is good – they do a mean decaf long black that’s worth saving on the long walk back towards Central.
Website: http://twigcafe.com.au/site/
fleetwood macchiato, erskineville
Golden Cobra coffee. 43 Erskineville Rd, Erskineville. Don’t let this photo fool you – Erskineville Rd, when you’re not visiting on a quiet public holiday Monday, is a busy street. This cafe has a fairly intimate space at the front, with a much larger back room (you’ll find out if you head to the bathroom during a visit) where the longer-form cooking takes place.
Beyond the clever name is an impressive array of food – generous servings, beautifully presented, and an emphasis on free-range products and what can be made on-site.
Coffee is expertly prepared. In addition to the house espresso (and well-made decaf long-black), there are a range of other options – pour over, cold drip, and cold filter. It’s rare to find a place that takes as much care over both food and coffee, but this is one. Worth revisiting.
movie: now you see me
I’d won a couple of free tickets to Now You See Me, and was hoping to catch it early in its Australian distribution, but it wasn’t until this week that a friend and I made it to Hurstville Event Cinema to cash in the tickets.
I’d heard quite a few reviews of the film by now, of course, and so I wasn’t too surprised by the overall structure. I hadn’t heard the twist, though I had a reasonable sense of where the film was going.
It was an enjoyable enough ride (the director also made Transporter 2), and a sequel is in the works, but the main problem is the characters. They’re so unlikeable. It only took a few moments with each to realise that there was no reason to care about any of them, and that we were stuck wanting to understand the mystery, not to urge the characters to succeed.
Surely the movie would have been developed in such a way that some likeable characters could have been introduced? This means that a range of actors who would otherwise be quite watchable are just wasted.
If you can cope with watching a movie where you’re not invested in the success of the major characters, it’s worth a look. The visual spectacle is such that a big screen viewing is worthwhile, if you can still find it.
domains and content for church websites
A friend posted this question on facebook
Thinking about Church websites, any one got an opinion as to what suffix to use. eg. should it be .com .com.au, .org, .org.au. Also what features do you reckon a good church website should have. thanks
If you’re a church, I think you should have a dot-org domain name. If you’re a church in Australia, I think you should have a dot-au kind of domain name. So I would say dot-org-dot-au would be the domain name.
Further, keep in mind the way you’ll use the URL. It’s going to go on printed material, it’s going to be part of a lot of email addresses, so think about ambiguous spelling, and how hard it’s going to be to spell out over the phone. They simpler the better. If your denomination is hard to spell (like Presbyterian), think about an abbreviation instead (if it’s still available).
In terms of features to include on a website, it’s better to think in terms of content than features. What are you trying to achieve with your church website? I would say that a church website is the modern-day equivalent to the sign out the front of your church. If you have a lot of resourcing, time and effort, it can be more than that, but at a basic level it should have
- Name of the church (so people know whose website they are on)
- Picture of the church building (so people know which building in physical space they’re talking about)
- Sunday Service times (so people can come and see your service)
- Picture of a Sunday service (so people know what to expect, what to wear, what kind of people go to your church)
- Map of where your service is
- Contact form / Email address where people can ask questions
And all of these things should be easily viewable on a smart phone. If you feel you need to explain a lot of denomination-specific things to your church website visitors, why not link back to the denomination’s state or federal website, instead of re-inventing the wheel on your website?
I would say that the primary audience for a church website should be people who haven’t been to your church before – you can tell regulars what they need to do via email, or on a member-facing part of the site: there’s no need to fill up your website with content for multiple of audiences.
If you have more resources to keep a website up to date, then by all means start doing something more complicated, but this would be where I’d start.
Any further questions? I’d love to write more on this topic if it’s of any use to people.
Book: The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor
Book: The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor: Reflections on Life and Ministry
Saw this on a discount shelf at Koorong, and thought I’d pick it up. Joint authored by John Piper and Don Carson, this is the story of two gifted academics and church ministers who took quite different paths.
Piper started out as an academic, and ended up pastoring a church for 30 years. Carson sought to be a pastor, but ended up an academic instead. Each author shows how including the skills of the other role is important.
If you’re interested in biographical details of either author, it’s worth a look. It’s a short read, at just over 100 pages.
life, the universe and nothing – part two
City Bible Forum paid to bring both Lawrence Krauss and William Lane Craig from their respective universities for a three-part series of conversations called “Life, the Universe and Nothing”. The series is a little hard for the average person to attend – the first session was in Brisbane, the second in Sydney, and the third will be in Melbourne.
Having read a summary of the first session, I had fairly low hopes of a meeting of the minds taking place before me.
Here are a few of the tweets and other items from the night:
The event was more civil than I was fearing, but Krauss still spent a little too long playing the man, rather than engaging with the arguments. There was a palpable calming down over time, and by the end they seemed to be talking to each other rather than over each other. Kudos to the moderator: though she had problems keeping her questions on track, and I would have liked to see her pose more questions from the floor, she tried to give each speaker the floor in an appropriate way.
I found it much more productive talking with a skeptical friend afterward than listening to much of the debate, though I’m interested to read further on the topic of consciousness (and of the soul using the brain as an instrument to control the body), and of quantum gravity, where physics is trying to reach right back to the big bang and explain what happened.
I’m not sure I am any closer to understanding the topic at hand after attending the debate, but it was a good way to start a discussion going, and the two speakers were lively and thought-provoking.
Thanks to CBF for organising the event.
Movie: The World’s End
I saw The World’s End with a friend on Friday night. Both the same age, somewhere around 20 years out from high school, this was a good film to see.
Are your school days the happiest days of your life? Almost certainly not, for a range of reasons. But the enduring friendships that are formed during the school days, and the issues involved in overcoming the challenges of time and other life changes are somewhat universal, especially to people of a certain age.
This movie (the third in the loosely formed “Three Colours Cornetto” trilogy, after Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz) mashes up the idea of a reunion movie with (spoilers ahoy, but not if you’ve seen the trailer) a sci fi apocalypse movie, with lots of rather colourful language and copious drinking and drug references throughout.
As a fan of the previous two movies, I found this one to have a greater sense, if not of maturity then at least of a deeper understanding of the characters they’re writing and portraying. If you too are a fan of the previous films, you’ll enjoy this one.
bible software and the commercialisation of spirituality
Last week I read the NYT article on the YouVersion bible app – it talks about YouVersion – an ad-free Bible on your phone, tablet and computer. The very notion of an ad-free bible took me by surprise a little, but that’s the direction that the majority of bible apps seem to be taking. When I was still using a Windows computer with floppy drives in it, I had a copy of a program called QuickVerse (now up to version 10) – it was very much a program (this was before everything was an app) that emphasised the uniqueness of the bible apart from other works.
I tried QuickVerse in later versions, but it had fallen into a common trap: thinking you’re as likely to search other books as search the bible in a piece of software you’ve bought to study the bible: a subtle, but significant problem started to creep in. As I started to do further language study, I moved across to Accordance for Mac and bought the Greek New Testament with it so I could try and read that. It was a perfectly workable program, but when it came time to learn Hebrew as well, the upgrade path looked like it would cost just as much as to buy Logos outright, and I thought I’d test it out as well.
I think I prefer Logos over Accordance for actual ease of use, but Logos is relentless in trying to sell you additional books, and to upgrade the software you have and the collection of books you have. It has reached the point now where I was using it for some vaguely spiritual purpose, and there was a pop-up window, encouraging me to buy the paid upgrade at a limited-time discount price.
Knowing what I do about digital marketing, they’re just trying to pull out all the stops to sell more of their product in the most effective way possible, but what it feels like is that people-who-buy-Christian-books are a particular target market, and that every tactic possible is fair game. It has reached the point where even as a paid user of their app, I feel like I’m getting ads presented to me in ways that are too intrusive.
As much as the NYT article above talks about printed bibles sitting on the shelf gathering dust, the blaring, commercialised software that we’re heading towards seems too great a contrast from the still small voice of God that we’re trying to listen to in these apps.
Is it just me?