I’ve been away for a couple of weeks, but here are some interesting reads I’ve clipped recently. Enjoy!
5 Things You Didn’t Know About Gen Y and Work
Generation Y’ers have overtaken the job market by storm and they have brought their own agenda with them. They aren’t hard to spot either. You may see them armed with casual attitudes, flip flops or earbuds stuck in their ears. To be frank, things are changing in the workplace. Fast. Current college graduates and the flooding pool of new and viable workers are redefining what it means to be productive at work. These changes mean big things for every player in the workplace, employee or boss.
Should You Be Facebook Friends with Your Pastor?
The State of Missouri recently outlawed teacher-student Facebook friendships, stating this in the legislation :
Teachers cannot establish, maintain, or use a work-related website unless it is available to school administrators and the child’s legal custodian, physical custodian, or legal guardian. Teachers also cannot have a nonwork-related website that allows exclusive access with a current or former student.
The Ontario College of Teachers issued this advisory :
Avoid exchanging private texts, phone numbers, personal e-mail addresses or photos of a personal nature with students.
Decline student-initiated “friend” requests and do not issue “friend” requests to students.
If the general populous sees a danger with social media relationships, shouldn’t the Church take inventory?
Like a teacher, a Pastor is placed into a position of authority.
Should the same rules that are being applied to these teachers be honored by Pastors?
Liberal Christianity — A Critique
Michael Bird offers a critique of liberal theology and liberalism in general. He states,
I’ve been called a “liberal” and I’ve been called a “fundamentalist” by different folks. The term “liberal” is used pejoratively but relatively to describe someone left of where someone else sits on a theological spectrum. The “Old Liberalism” that dominated Western/European Protestant thought from Friedrich Schleiermacher to WWI collapsed as its religious vision did not match the European reality of human evil. In its stead, there has risen a plurality of theologies including evangelicalism, neo-orthodoxy, Pentecostalism, and a host of “progressive” Christian theologies. These progressive Christian theologies are the heirs of the Old Liberalism. Their aim is not to destroy the faith, far from it, they see themselves as saving it, by accommodating faith to the spirit of the age, making it more palatable to the masses, translating its idiom into contemporary language, engaging the challenge of religious meaning in a post-Enlightenement world, and even secularizing faith to some degree. Some liberals are just oxygen thieves like Jack Spong, others such as Rowan Williams (who really defies tags like “liberal” I guess), are more humble, learned, and even edifying. Some liberal scholars, both radical and the just less-conservative-than-me types, are good exegetes. They might not believe what they’re reading, but they are often jolly good at explaining what the text says and in what context. I concede also that liberals have a genuine heart for the poor and the oppressed. That said, I don’t think they actually do much for them since it is usually Catholics and Evangelicals who actually do ground zero work in social care.
The Social Trinity, Ecclesiology and Church Leadership — The Series
JR Woodward explores how a Social View of the Trinity Can Positively Inform Our Approach to Ecclesiology and Leadership in Today’s North American Church
Should Christians be socialists? By Jay W. Richards
Richards explores the book “From Jesus’ socialism to capitalistic Christianity” by Gregory Paul. Paul argues that American Christians who defend the free economy are involved in a profound contradiction, since Jesus and Christianity are self-evidently socialistic. Richards disagrees and critiques Paul’s thesis.
Storytelling: digital technology allows us to tell tales in innovative new ways
Stories are memory aids, instruction manuals and moral compasses. When enlisted by charismatic leaders and turned into manifestos, dogmas and social policy, they’ve been the foundations for religions and political systems. When a storyteller has held an audience captive around a campfire, a cinema screen or on the page of a bestseller, they’ve reinforced local and universal norms about where we’ve been and where we’re going. And when they’ve been shared in the corner shop, at the pub or over dinner they’ve helped us define who we are and how we fit in.
Human experience is a series of never-ending, overlapping stories bumping into one another in expected and unexpected ways. Our days are made up of personal narratives of good and evil, joy and conflict, magic potions and angry gnomes. They are naturally co-creations based on a push and pull of projection and interpretation. We interpret, analyse and synthesise the characters and events in our lives to help us make sense of the world, and these have been translated by professionals into folk tales, myths, legends, pantomime, bestsellers, soap operas and Hollywood blockbusters. Storytellers are simply curators of information who finesse the elements of a yarn into a beginning, middle and end.