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29 November 2012
Forum on female commentators, theologians, writers
Scripture is clear: there is no such thing as a female pastor under Christ's Lordship. Any woman who aspires to leadership over men in the church is eo ipso disqualified, if only on the grounds that she does not bow the knee to Christ as Lord in terms of her sexuality, and this itself is a disqualifying vice.
So what about female seminary professors? Female commentators? Female theologians, academics, writers?
A well-regarded commentary on Peter is by Karen Jobes. Jobes has also written on Esther, among other things. Tyndale OTC volumes on Daniel and 1-2 Samuel were by Joyce Baldwin. One of the good books on male/female issues was written by Susan Foh.
I'm currently working through a book of devotions on the Greek New Testament, for which I am writing a review. Some of the contributors are female, one of them a hyphenated Notre Dame grad who's a prof in what at least once was an evangelical seminary.
Now, I'll be up-front with you. If I was out of town and visited a church that had a promising name, and a woman stood up to preach posing as a pastor, I'd likely quietly walk out. I wouldn't find it worshipful to sit and watch her shake her fist in Christ's face, and I wouldn't want to harm her by fostering her illusion.
Should we care about the agendas of the women who write these books, teach these courses? Should we make it a point to inquire what they are attempting to accomplish in their careers? Should we care whether they are working towards erasing resistance to female pastors? Are we aiding those efforts by using those resources? Are we safe in assuming that all these and other female Christian writers are happy, Godly mothers, who are subordinate to their husbands as to Christ, and wouldn't dream of preaching or teaching a class with men in it?
These aren't meant as "trick" or loaded questions. I don't have an airtight, all-encompassing answer. Worse, I can't think of any substantial discussion I've ever seen on the topic, though at-least-nominally evangelical female writers and professors seem to be proliferating.
When I was at seminary, it was controversial. Our seminary had fairly recently begun admitting women to the MDiv program. An MDiv is generally perceived as a professional degree for pastors. The argument was that these women were pastors' wives and teachers of women; and why shouldn't they have the benefit of the best education?
One of my fellow-profs' off-the-record response was, "That's like handing someone a loaded pistol, and telling him never, ever to shoot it."
I'm wondering what the brain trust thinks about it, or what resources you've found that I haven't yet seen.
28 November 2012
A Parable about Drunk Driving
I am travelling this week for work, and I am composing ahead so that you don't go without in spite of my sad and sorry state of out-of-townedness.
I'm thinking about a police force which, because they cannot catch all drunk drivers, they refuse to enforce any of the statutes regarding drunk driving.
Is that an ethically-sufficient way to reason about drunk driving?
27 November 2012
Notable posts on marital abuse, December 25, and a whole lot more
Howdy, gang.
Thabiti Anyabwile unintentionally gives us a sad example of blogging at its best and worst. On the one hand, he provides a letter to an abusive husband that contains a lot of pastoral, masculine, godly wisdom. It's well-written and forthrightly addresses a miserable situation with the Gospel and with truth.
Immediately he's set upon by an angry, stubborn, self-righteous commenter who gives no evidence of having thoughtfully read anything below the title. Thabiti, God bless 'im, tries manfully and with incredible grace to engage the poor soul graciously and patiently and, as we Pyros could have predicted, it goes nowhere, and the meta has to be closed. Metas often bear out the truth of Ecclesiastes 9:18b ("one sinner destroys much good"), and this is a case in point.
So read the post, skip the comments — unless you want to see a Herculean model of grace in Thabiti's attempts to reach out and engage a scoffer. You might be thinking of Prov. 17:12, 27:22, and 29:9... and if that makes you wish you had a solid, in-depth Christian book that would help you read, apply, teach and preach Proverb — well, you know.
And BTW, Thabiti is there experiencing what drove me to the philosophy of strategery with which I blog.
You may know that N. T. Wright has sallied forth to speak down to us benighted bumpkins about what Serious Scholars know to be the truth behind (and contrary to) the words of Paul. Douglas Wilson responds once, yea twice, yea unto three times. Readable and witty, as usual.
In much lighter humor, Kevin DeYoung posted a couple of very cute videos.
This reminds me of one you might enjoy, especially you Joss Whedon fans. It's a literally-told Story Written By a Kid. You'll love it, and you'll never think of SWAT the same.
If textual criticism is your thing, you'll appreciate an article at Triablogue about recently-announced manuscript finds.
At that same blog, Jason Engwer tells us more about the December 25 date for Christmas than we would have thought it possible to know.
Professor Matt Harmon. of Grace Theological Seminary, did me the great favor of proofing my Greek notes and translations for that little green book. You'll want to bookmark his series on the Gospel according to the Minor Prophets.
Sharper Iron ran a really terrific post by Gary Gilley (why do I know that name?; or am I thinking of Garry Graham, who used to beat me up regularly when I was a single-digiter?...but I digress) called Cessationism, Revelation & Prophecy. Gilley reads as if he were a regular Pyro reader conversant with our years of work on the endlessly-vital subject, and his robust and pastoral exposition is a very worthwhile contribution.
Then Gilley follows up with A Case for Cessationism, in which he argues (among other things) that "the position taken by most on prophecy—cautious but open—is untenable." he deals with the "God in a box" dodge and the dithery cowardice of refusing to commit robustly to the implications of really believing in a really sufficient Word.
Do you prefer your Carl Trueman crusty, or non-crusty? The latter? Sorry, all out!
In case you missed it, I offered a jazzy little rendition of a little dittie by a Reformer guy.
Finally, would you like to hear a sermon that discusses the notion of "the call to pastoral ministry," the concept of qualifications and unculpability, and what Titus 1:6 means about the pastor's family life? How about if it contains the words "Not just any idiot can be an elder. It takes a special kind of idiot." Ah, interested now? Then you're in luck.
25 November 2012
Our Place
The PyroManiacs devote some space each weekend to highlights from the lifetime of works from the Prince of Preachers, Charles Haddon Spurgeon. The following excerpt is from The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, volume 35, sermon number 2,066, "Our Place: At Jesus' Feet"
"We know nothing, and we teach ourselves."
"She had a sister called Mary, which also sat at Jesus' feet, and heard his word"; so that "at Jesus' feet" is the fitting place for a willing learner. A lowly sense of our own ignorance so that we do not dare to sit higher than "at his feet," but a believing confidence in his infinite wisdom so that we do sit "at his feet" to learn of him—this is suitable. How much better scholars we should be if we tried to learn at Jesus' feet! Some even of the Lord's people are a deal too knowing. Many a boy at school does not learn anything of an excellent master, for he is conceited: he knows nothing, and he teaches himself. I am afraid we are like that scholar. We know nothing, and we teach ourselves. We have prejudices—opinions of what truth ought to be. This is evil. But, oh, it is very sweet to feel, "I do not know anything. I come, and take the Bible, and ask it to photograph itself upon my heart"! Some minds are like stained glass windows; they shut out much of the light, and the little light that does struggle through, they colour after their own manner. It is well to be plain glass, so that the Lord's light, with all its colour and delicacy of shade, may come in just as it comes from heaven, with nothing gathered from ourselves. Beloved, I pray the Lord to free us all from prejudice, from self-conceit, and from opinions which originate with others.
We must learn at Jesus' feet; not at the feet of man, when man goes away from Christ. At times the Lord may send a man whom he teaches, and what we gather from him may be God's own voice to us. Still we must always be ready to discriminate between what the man says of himself, and what he says in his Master's name; for there is a grave difference. "At Jesus' feet" we must take up our seat. Dear young men, that are beginning to study theology, and that wish to become teachers of others, do not give yourselves up to any system, and say, "I follow this doctor, or that." John Wesley is not our master; but Jesus Christ. John Calvin is not our Master; but Jesus Christ. It does not signify how great and good these men were: they were worthy of the love of all the church of God, but we call them not Rabbi. We may follow the man as far as the man follows Christ, but not an inch farther. We must sit at Jesus' feet, humble, teachable, child-like, confidently believing what Jesus says, but having no "know" of our own—taking it all from him.
22 November 2012
Give thanks! [updated repost]
First posted in 2010, this features a new hymn and extended notes.
Though many psalms feature the giving of thanks, this is the only psalm whose title labels it such. No psalmist could have envisioned our notion of a private inner glow of gratitude; to them, thanking God was characteristically out-loud (vv. 2, 4), loud (v. 1), public (vv. 1, 2, 4), and communal (v. 4).
This psalm is in two movements; or rather, one movement that is then echoed. Though his reasoning parallels Paul's, his order is backwards: first, the call to action (vv. 1-2, 4); then the reason (vv. 3, 5). There's always a why to the what. While Paul characteristically gives the why (Eph. 1—3; Col. 1—2) before the what (Eph. 4—6; Col. 3—4), the psalmist formally does the reverse.
You know, this wouldn't be a bad psalm to memorize.
Or sing.
Happy Thanksgiving, friends, from us to you.
21 November 2012
The Annual Turkey Recipe
|Just a picture from the Internet
You do not have to be "truly reformed" to use this recipe. You just have to like Turkey and stuffing.
Roasting a turkey isn't as hard as it sounds. Here's a basic recipe to get you started. In this case, the turkey is stuffed. DO NOT stuff the turkey and put it in the fridge overnight: that's bacteriologically a bad idea, and we want you all to enjoy Thanksgiving on the sofa, not on a hospital gurney.
12- to 14-lb. turkey, thawed if purchased frozen
1 bag, your favorite "Italian" croutons
2-4 bouillon cubes
2-3 stalks, celery, chopper or cubed
1 cup carrots, chopped
½ cup onions, finely chopped
1 tsp, dried parsley
1 cup, cashews
Pepper and Garlic Salt
- Preheat your oven to 325. Remove the cooking racks, then place one rack into oven at the lowest position.
- Unwrap your THAWED Turkey in a clean sink, and remove the giblets – that bag of stuff that you never thought you would use for anything because it looks gross. It's not gross. You may have to unhook the metal clip which holds the legs together in order to get all the giblets out; you may have to run some warm water into the bird to get the giblets out. Don't be afraid.
- Start a medium-sized pot of water boiling – not more than 3 cups. Put your packet of giblets in the water (sans wrapping paper), along with your bouillon cubes and the carrots, celery and parlsey. 2 cubes will make a somewhat-mild flavored stuffing; 6 will make a very salty and spicy stuffing. You know what you like best, so add the cubes to the low end of your tolerance for spicy. For your reference, I usually use 4 cubes. Boil this mix for about 30 minutes – long enough to cook the giblets thoroughly.
- While the soup (yes: you very smart readers knew that we were making soup, didn't you?) is cooking, wash the Turkey thoroughly, inside and out. I wouldn't use soap as you might miss a spot in the rinse and ruin your hours of hard work here, but washing the bird is an important health safety tip. If we were deep frying the bird (that's the Christmas recipe), washing is pretty much unimportant because if some germ can survive the deep fryer, it will kill you before you eat any of the dinner. Anyway, clean the bird thoroughly and put it in a large roasting pan. For this recipe, the deeper the roasting pan, the better. I suggest a large disposable roasting pan from WAL*MART even though it might possibly ring up at the wrong price.
If you get bored waiting for the soup to finish up, this would be a good time to rub salt and pepper into the skin of your bird. Visually, salt and pepper the skin so that it looks like very light TV static. Do the top (the breast side) and the bottom (where the shoulders are); do not worry if you put less on the breast side. Because of the way this bird is going to cook, pay special attention to salting and peppering the wings and drumsticks.
- You now have a clean, prepped bird and a very delicious-smelling pot of soup. You have to make stuffing now. Remove the soup from the heat and remove the giblets. If you are a complete carnivore (like me), take the fully-cooked giblets to your food chopper and chop them up and put them back into the soup (you can't chop up the neck, but if you have 20 minutes, de-bone the neck and put your neck meat into the soup).
Those of you grossed out by chopping up the giblets can throw them away. The rest of us will weep for you.
Now empty the bag of croutons into the soup. If you used about 2 cups of water, you will get a somewhat-damp bread-and-soup mixture; if you used about 3 cups of water, you will get a very wet bread-and-soup mixture. I like the latter better, but some people like their stuffing more dry than others. The extraordinary secret here is that a soupier stuffing makes for a more-moist bird in the final product. After the soup and the bread are well- mixed, add the cashews and mix again.
- When you have this mixing complete, use a tablespoon and start loading the stuffing into the bird. Pack the stuffing down into the bird to get the cavity of the body completely full of stuffing. Don't leave any air pockets. Once the Turkey is completely stuffed, position it in the roasting tray breast-side down (I learned that from watching Emeril) in the center of the pan, and load the pan with the rest of your stuffing mix.
- Cover the Turkey, and place it inside your oven. After 2 hours in the heat, remove the cover and roast for another hour. In this final hour, the skin of the exposed parts should turn golden brown. At the end of the third hour, test the bird with a meat thermometer; the center temperature should be 175-180 degrees F. It will be the most unbelievable bird you every ate.
20 November 2012
"Horrible! Horrible! Horrible!" — the offense of the Gospel
Almost seventy of the folks who read the Kindle edition of my little green book highlighted this passage:
The fact is that the authentic gospel of the New Testament remains extremely offensive to human pride, and nobody who preaches it faithfully can expect to escape at least some degree of opposition. Paul found in his day that the message of Christ crucified was both folly to Greek intellectuals and a stumbling block to self-righteous Jews. Nobody can reach God by his own wisdom or by his own morality. Only at the cross can God be known. And this is doubly offensive to men and women of culture. They resent the exclusiveness of the Christian claim, and even more the humiliation implicit in it. Christ from his cross seems to say to us, "I am here because of you. If it were not for your sin and pride, I would not be here. And if you could have saved yourself, I would not be here either." The Christian pilgrimage begins with bowed head and bent knee; there is no other way into the kingdom of God except by the exaltation of those who have humbled themselves.
I have often thanked God that he taught me this truth very early in my Christian experience, partly through glimpses into the pride of my own heart and partly through a glimpse into somebody else's. It was when I was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge. Only recently I had come to Christ myself, and now — clumsily, I am sure — I was trying to share the good news with a fellow student. I was endeavoring to explain the great doctrine of justification by grace alone, that salvation was Christ's free gift, and that we could neither buy it nor even contribute to its purchase, for Christ had obtained it for us and was now offering it to us gratis. Suddenly to my intense astonishment, my friend shouted three times at the top of his voice, "Horrible! Horrible! Horrible!" Such is the arrogance of the human heart that it finds the good news not glorious (which it is) but horrible (which it is not).
Postscript: I heartily recommend Stott's book, but I do have a bitter gripe. It's one of those ridiculous cases where, in a book rich with quotations, the publisher (Eerdmans!) has inexplicably removed the documentation from the quotation, in the execrable form of chapter endnotes.
18 November 2012
Always, And For All Things
The PyroManiacs devote some space each weekend to highlights from the lifetime of works from the Prince of Preachers, Charles Haddon Spurgeon. The following excerpt is from The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, volume 19, sermon number 1,094, "Always, And For All Things.""Look downward and give thanks, for you are saved from hell; look on the right hand and give thanks, for you are enriched with gracious gifts; look on the left hand and give thanks, for you are shielded from deadly ills; look above you and give thanks, for heaven awaits you."
sorrows also supply a channel for the overflow of our joys. We may weep to God's praise if we feel it to be most natural. We are to give thanks in our spirit, feeling not only resigned, acquiescent, and content, but grateful for all that God does to us and for us. We are bound to show this gratitude by our actions, for obedience is at once the most sincere and the most acceptable method of giving thanks. To go about irksome and labourious duty cheerfully is to thank God; to bear sickness and pain patiently, because it is according to his will, is to thank God; to sympathise with suffering saints for love of Jesus is to bless God; and to love the cause of God, and to defend it for Christ's sake, is to thank God. The angels, when they praise God, not only sing "Hallelujah, hallelujah," but they obey, "doing his commandments, hearkening to the voice of his word." We must give thanks to God in every shape that shall be expressive of our hearts and suitable to the occasion; and although changing the mode, we may thus continue without cessation to give thanks unto God, even the Father.
Beloved, after all it is but a light thing to render to our heavenly Father our poor thanks, after he has given us our lives, maintained us in being, saved us our souls through the precious redemption of Jesus Christ, given us to be his children, and made us heirs of eternal glory. What are our thanks in the presence of all these priceless favours? Why, if we gave our God a thousand lives, and could spend each one of these in a perpetual martyrdom, it were a small return for what he has bestowed upon us; but to give him thanks is the least we can do, and shall we be slack in that? He gives us breath, shall we not breathe out his praise? He fills our mouth with good things, shall we not speak well of his name?
Shall we fail even with words and tongues? God forbid. We will praise the name of the Lord, for his mercy endureth for ever. None of us will say, "I pray thee have me excused." The poorest, weakest, and least-gifted person can give thanks. The work of thanksgiving does not belong to the man of large utterance, for he who can hardly put two words together can give thanks; nor is it confined to the man of large possessions, for the woman who had but two mites—which make a farthing—gave substantial thanks. The smoking flax may give thanks that it is not quenched, and the bruised reed may give thanks that it is not broken. Even the dumb may give thanks, their countenance can smile a psalm; and the dying can give thanks, their placid brow beaming forth a hymn. No Christian therefore can honestly say, "I am unable to exercise the delightful privilege of giving thanks." We may one and all at this moment give thanks unto God our Father. Brethren, let us do so.
15 November 2012
Last Sunday I preached on Titus 1:4, which I translated thus:
to Titus, genuine child in accord with our shared faith: grace and peace, from God the Father, and Christ Jesus our Savior.As I rolled the verse over in my mind, I knew that I wanted to open up the significance of this purebred Jewish Rabbi calling this dirtybred gentile Gentile a "genuine child in accord with our shared faith." I wanted to find a way to highlight what a massive thing it was that Paul, for years, had gladly worked with Titus as his Exhibit A of Gentile conversion, his beloved and trusted coworker, and his go-to guy to send into dicey situations.
But I never felt I had it, never felt I had an angle that would come close to doing it justice...until I connected it with a current story in the news.
Ordained United Methodist Church Reverend Joseph Lowery, "civil rights icon," spoke in a Baptist church in Georgia and said that when he was younger, he thought all white people were going to Hell. But then when he was older, he mellowed a bit.
But now Lowery said he had come around to his former opinion. Lowery also expressed incredulity that any — and here he used a foul vulgarity for "black person" — wouldn't vote his skin-color.
This struck me for a great many reasons, one of which being that I've long been concerned about the ongoing racial division in American Christianity. It is still said to be true that the church hour is the most segregated hour in the week, and it seems everyone is pointing fingers in the opposite direction. Often in the wrong direction, as I increasingly see it.
AN ASIDE: by the way, does the identity of the speaker, or his skin-color, or the skin-color of his "joke's" targets, matter? Should it? From a Gospel perspective, could it?
So I thought of Paul, whose own background was that of prejudice. Apart from Christ, he and Titus wouldn't have given each other the time of day. There's rabbinic snark to the effect that God had a good reason for creating Gentiles: as fuel for the fires of Gehenna. I shared a few other lovely sentiments in the sermon.
Yet now here Paul is, expressing in many ways and locations his affection and respect for this Greek dude, Titus.
But even more, here was a ministry in Crete where Paul's own countrymen were present in force (Titus 1:10). Now look: Paul had a common bond with them. They were the oppressed. They had shared the struggle, shared it even now. Titus and the Gentiles were the oppressors. Where would Paul's sympathies lie? With whom would Paul form common cause? And why?
But of course, Paul's relationship with Titus (and many others) showed that something had blasted apart this wall of racial prejudice and hatred. It was a past issue, a state for which Paul expressed no nostalgia. Paul didn't merely talk reconciliation, he lived it. He fought for it.
Can you imagine Paul standing and joking that he'd once thought all Gentiles were going to Hell, had mellowed — and then had come back around to his former opinion? Or can you imagine what Paul would do if he sat in an audience where that "joke" was told? Would he yuck it up?
Well, you know, as long as we've got Galatians 2:11ff. in our Bible, we don't have to guess, do we?
So what was it that demo'd the wall of hatred and division for Paul? You know the answer. It was the Gospel. It was the Cross. It tilted Paul's world.
The Cross should be the death of such things. The Cross is the death of such things. What do we see at Calvary? A white God giving His Son for a white world? God forbid. A black God, a brown God? Yellow? No. Just God, Creator of all things and all humans, so loving a world of lost guilty rebels of every people, tribe, nation and tongue that He gave His Son for them. You see God's Son hanging between heaven and earth, groaning not under white sins or black sins, but under human sins.
That's a snippet of what I gleaned and applied from this passage; you can find the sermon and the outline here, if you like.
God grant that the church — every part of it — work a whole lot harder to embody what Christ did so much to create.
14 November 2012
Not a Trade School or a Book Club
We have been talking about this passage in 1Thes:
But we were gentle among you, like a nursing mother taking care of her own children. 8 So, being affectionately desirous of you, we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us.
9 For you remember, brothers, our labor and toil: we worked night and day, that we might not be a burden to any of you, while we proclaimed to you the gospel of God. 10 You are witnesses, and God also, how holy and righteous and blameless was our conduct toward you believers. 11 For you know how, like a father with his children, 12 we exhorted each one of you and encouraged you and charged you to walk in a manner worthy of God, who calls you into his own kingdom and glory.
And we have discussed that, in this passage, in Paul's view, the normal life of the local church has at least 3 components: Pastoral Care, Personal Affection, and Preaching the Gospel. But there is a fourth component: Perfecting the Gospel.
4. Perfecting the Gospel
"walk in a manner worthy of God, who calls you into his own kingdom and glory," Paul said to the Thessalonians.
When Paul said this same thing to Titus at the end of his life, he said it this way, in Titus 2:
For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.He means that there are necessary consequences of the Gospel. He says right above that section that they must "adorn the doctrine of God our Savior." That's what "adorn" means: your wife may be beautiful in her own right, but there is something you can do for her which prefects her beauty. You may "adorn" her with praise, or "adorn" her with honor, or better yet: "adorn" her with love. You make what is already there perfect, complete, by doing the things which are necessary in order to show that they are true.
This is also what Paul sees as the ordinary life of the local church. The fruit of the Spirit is there. There's a sense there that somehow, Jesus is coming and we must be ready for him, and that when we behave as if what we believe is actually true, being called to God's Kingdom and Glory are worth it. We must walk in a manner which is worthy of God, worthy of the calling into God's Kingdom and God's Glory.
So this is Paul's ordinary instruction to the church:
For you remember, brothers, our labor and toil: we worked night and day, that we might not be a burden to any of you, while we proclaimed to you the gospel of God. 10 You are witnesses, and God also, how holy and righteous and blameless was our conduct toward you believers. 11 For you know how, like a father with his children, 12 we exhorted each one of you and encouraged you and charged you to walk in a manner worthy of God, who calls you into his own kingdom and glory.It's funny how Paul can pull the cover off the ordinary so quickly to reveal the extraordinary that is underneath it. We get ourselves wrapped up in the idea that somehow, the big issues of the Christian life are wrapped up in big words and systematic theology. We think that somehow God has decided that to follow him you need to get a whole new vocabulary which might not even be complete or adequate if you don't know Greek and Hebrew and Latin. But here, in this letter to people in a persecuted church, Paul doesn't use any of those words at all. He doesn't resort to extraordinary language. And he doesn't appeal to an extraordinary experience – but he makes the point that somehow the Gospel makes us zealous for an ordinary life which is worthy of Himself, and His Kingdom.
This letter is written after Paul's first visit to Thessalonica, yes? But what Paul is describing here is what happened when he was in Thessalonica. When he was done teaching, this is how Acts 17 describes the outcome:
But the Jews were jealous, and taking some wicked men of the rabble, they formed a mob, set the city in an uproar, and attacked the house of Jason, seeking to bring them out to the crowd. And when they could not find them, they dragged Jason and some of the brothers before the city authorities, shouting, "These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also, and Jason has received them, and they are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus."After the Thessalonians were taught by Paul, their whole city knew there was something different about them – and described it as turning the whole world upside down. Yet somehow when we look at this letter, and Paul's description of what he taught these people, somehow it looks utterly harmless. It looks simple – maybe too simple, too obvious or boring. But when it was first demonstrated, it was an event that changed the world.
• Pastoral Care.
• Personal Affection and concern.
• Proclamation of the Gospel.
• Perfecting the Gospel.
It's a completely-ordinary thing – or it seems that way. We are prone to take it for granted, to forget that this is not a social club or a trade school or a book club. This is the place where the Kingdom of God is breaking into the world, and the victory of Jesus over sin and death is doing something that is not of this world.
I'm going to tell a story here to close up our time about my brother-in-law, David. He tells a story about the first time he visited Boston. David's ex-military, and He says that he can remember all through school people told him about American history -- about the events that happened that caused us to be a country, the list of facts. But in Boston, he found himself out in the harbor looking down into the water, and when he looked into the water and out at the harbor he realized: "Wow. This is were they dropped the tea into the harbor." And at that moment, all those men and all the stories about them weren't just facts or true statements anymore: the real people became obvious to him, and it changed the way he thought about our country and his part in it.
It seems ridiculous – he lived his whole life in the United States, and walked around in it receiving all kinds of benefits from being a citizen. But for him to really get it, to really understand that something happened to change the whole course of history, he had to do something as mundane as stand in front of the body of water where they threw some cargo into the ocean for the light bulb to go off.
But that's what it seems to be about the local church – about Paul's ordinary message to the Thessalonians. In the same way that David finally got it, that THIS is where they threw the tea into the Harbor, Paul is telling us: show them the real Jesus. Show them the Gospel of God not as a metaphor, not as a seminar on ancient literature. Don't just show them a nice time. Show them that Jesus died for sin, and now the Glory of God and his Kingdom are coming into this world here, in the local church. Show them the Gospel of God, the extraordinary thing under the ordinary life of the church.
13 November 2012
Some good reads, 11/13/2012
Howdy gang.
In case you missed these, here are some items in which I thought you'd find pleasure and profit, and perhaps meet some sites worth bookmarking in the process.
- Fred Butler shares a video that you've got to stick with to "get." You'll be glad you did.
- Dr. Mark Snoeberger, assistant professor of systematic theology at Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary, has a dandy little article targeting the biggest lie about the concept of law relative to Christian living. Deconstructing deep-sounding aphorisms can be thankless, but it's very necessary, and Snoeberger does a good, Bibley job.
- Good word from Bill Mounce on logical flow of thought in Greek writing, the role the conjunction γὰρ (gar, often translated "for") plays, and how translations — ::cough::NIV!!!::cough:: — shouldn't just decide to drop them as if invisible.
- Lists are fun, particularly when they're well-done (rhyme!), and H. B. Charles, Jr. has a great list of (103!) things he's learned along the way in pastoral ministry. Not all God-breathed, of course; but all worth pondering. H. B.'s list is longer than mine; so I guess he's learned more.
- Last Sunday's sermon at CBC featured Titus 1:4 and was called "Titus: the right man for the job." We went into Titus' experience and qualifications for ministry and, along the way, the issue of racism in the professedly Christian church. I may write more on this, later.
- My two favorite written responses to last week's election in America are Tom Chantry's and Nathan Machel's (the latter known to Pyro readers as commenter "Trogdor"). Chantry's is both visceral and Biblical. Machel's is more visceral and, as usual for him, eminently quotable. For instance: "We believe it is the government's job to legislate morality, so long as that morality is immoral"; "We believe that when the government fails spectacularly and creates problems, the solution is more power for the government"; and "We think that "you have the right to use a product" and "someone else must pay for it" are equivalent." I love both posts.
11 November 2012
"He Is In One Mind"
The PyroManiacs devote some space each weekend to highlights from the lifetime of works from the Prince of Preachers, Charles Haddon Spurgeon. The following excerpt is from The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, volume 7, sermon number 406, "The Infallibility Of God's Purpose,"from Job 23:13.
"Will it not reconcile us to our sorrows, that they serve some end?"
08 November 2012
Post-election 2012 debriefing
But it won't be what you think, and it won't be what Everyone Else might be doing (with brilliant exceptions like this and this.)
Post-mortems are non-starters with me right now. No campaign is perfect, but Romney ran a campaign far better than what I ever thought him capable of. Picking him over like a crow on roadkill is a non-starter with me. For that matter, complaints about the MSM, Governor Christie, the GOP, the MSM, Hurricane Sandy or the MSM — all non-starters.
Also, clamoring to be this generation's Calvinistic Kent Brockman is a non-starter for me. (That last-linked post, four years later, is still surprisingly timely, to my mind.) The election was a disgrace. There is no excuse — none, zero — for the citizens (let alone Christians) who re-elected Barack Obama, whether by voting for him, by voting third-party, or by not voting. No amount of rationalization will make that okay. And so, here we are.
As I prepared for last night's service at church, I weighed continuing in our studies of prayer from Exodus, or taking an aside to give some instruction in the light of the election. Pastorally, knowing my people as I am growing to do, I felt the latter was the better course. So here, in outline and with just a few comments, is what I delivered. When one sister saw the title on the outline, she said with deep feeling, "Oh, thank you!" I hope it was helpful.
The Christian's proclamation of Jesus as King and Lord was viewed as subversive. It is because they did not look to culture or Caesar as ultimate. They did not look to any human authority or structure for meaning, significance, or ultimate direction.
This is why, while Christians have always been among the most productive and decent and law-abiding citizens, governments have characteristically hated them and regarded them with deep suspicion. Christians do not agree to let Caesar mold their thoughts and values, and will not depend on Caesar for life or meaning. Their ultimate interest is never the Kingdom of Man, but the Kingdom of God.
And this results from a worldview premised on the confession of Jesus' Lordship, with the necessary corollary rejection of man's autonomy and centrality.
Statist totalitarians hate that. Such "bitter clingers" threaten them to their very core. As they should.
If we don't see the need now, we will when tribulation, persecution and suffering come. And when that happens (as it will: Acts 14:22; 2 Tim. 3:12), it will be too late to begin stockpiling that wisdom.
III. We Must Invest Accordingly
We must be involved in the ministry of the local church, or we sin against God. That involvement will lead us to relationship, service, support of others. Christians have done this in the best of times and in the worst of times; and we must do it in days to come.
But Acts 2:47 points out that this mustn't be a sheerly self-absorbed cloistered retreat. I asked my dear folks how it happened that the Lord kept adding saved people to the church, and (God love 'em!) my folks instantly answered "By their spreading the Gospel." So Christians turned within for fellowship and worship and support, but they also and aggressively turned outward with the Gospel. They turned their world upside-down with an offensive message that was radically different from what the world already thought.
And, as the passages in 1 Corinthians underscore, they let nothing stop them. Living in a society even more oppressive than what American liberals are working hard (and successfully, with the help of Christianoid quislings) to create, they still put out the Gospel for all their worth.
And so must we.
07 November 2012
The aim of the charge
Last week we discussed that while Paul devoted himself to loving the Thessalonians as a pastor, as a father and a mother, these were people who took Paul's teaching to heart. They lived as if what Paul was teaching them was true, and more important than the priorities they had before they met him. Paul could love them because they were more than just good students: they demonstrated the love which they received.
This brings us to our second point:
2. Personal Affection and Concern
This is the part of this lesson that stung me most, so I'll say it upfront: this is the part of my spiritual life with which, frankly, I am most concerned. Follow me here for a second: most of the members of my local church live on the West Side of Little Rock, or in Maumelle, and they are together as a truly-local church. They live together. It's a good thing. And it may even seem like a completely conventional or routine thing to them because that's just the way it is.
But from my side of the blog (and te podium when I teach), I lack a real personal connection to people in this church. We saw it a couple of weeks ago when I lead prayer prior to another teacher's lesson, because I don't know most of the names of people with requests. Now: that is probably in great part a function of living in Bryant rather than on the West side of Little Rock, and not because I am actively callous toward any of you. We simply live 40 minutes away. But because of this, there is a divide between myself and most of you that I need to take seriously because of what Paul says here. Paul says, "we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us."
"Ready to share with you our own selves," he says – in the context that they had also shared themselves with him. In an ordinary letter like this one, this is a serious and sober challenge. In the ordinary life of the local church, Paul says that it's not even enough that we should simply share a word together once in a while, or worship together. He says we should be part of each others' lives.
This is the only place that the mothering and fathering Paul is talking about can really happen: if we are in one another's lives.
Before my wife and I moved to Little Rock 4 years ago, we belonged to a local church in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, to a church about this size – but in a town with only about 14,000 people. We lived close enough to the church that my wife could ride her bike there – and in the car, it wasn't 5 minutes to the front door of church. In that church, we knew people. They knew us. They knew where we lived, and we knew how to check up on them. They knew when our kids were sick, and when we were sick. We had dinner in each others' homes.
In pointing this out, I am not saying that this is the Gospel – because plenty of people without the Gospel have close friends. Plenty of people are deceived that the Gospel is only a close sense of community. What I am saying is that, as Paul says elsewhere, the aim of the charge for the Gospel is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. Somehow, this is the stuff that happens to people when they are full of the Gospel.
So my conviction this week from this ordinary text is that I don't show enough love to people for whom I ought to have a Gospel-planted love. My only lesson to all of you from that is: be less like I am, and more like I ought to be – more like I commit myself to be in the future. I should find ways to be available to the people in this church, and to share myself with them in spite of the busy sorts of lives we all find ourselves in. The Gospel doesn't just call us to occupy a building with each other once in a while: it calls us to give ourselves to each other.
There's a reason for this, which I will explain in a second, in our third point.
3. Proclamation of the Gospel
This seems fairly ordinary. It seems almost like a cliché of the Christian life. But Paul says, "we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves," and then "we worked night and day, that we might not be a burden to any of you, while we proclaimed to you the gospel of God." When he was sharing his life with them, it was not merely for the benefit of good company or companionship; when he was toiling so that they did not have to support him, we wasn't doing it just to have a decent character. The Gospel filled him with a desire for other people, and it also required him to make a place in their lives for himself and his message.
John MacArthur has said this about Paul's inclination toward people for the Gospel:
[Quote MacArthur] Do you know what Paul was in terms of an evangelist? He was a Biblical evangelist in so far as he saw his responsibility not only as winning people but as maturing them, … Do you know what his priority was in evangelism? Discipleship.
I think one of the things that very often is missing in our evangelism … is a failure to really love the individual that we've led to Christ to the point where we feel this tremendous responsibility.
If you don't learn anything about evangelism, learn this. The best way to evangelize is to produce one reproducing disciple. … Paul knew that this running around creating spiritual infancy all over, leaving a whole lot of spiritual babes lying on their backs screaming was not the way to go at it because they weren't mature enough to reproduce. Better to spend yourselves on some individuals that they might become mature and that they might carry the Gospel. Jesus didn't speak to large crowds very often and even when he did he spoke in parables and they didn't understand it. He spent most of his time with 12 individuals, didn't he? That's really the heart of evangelism. He was committed to the priority of maturing the believers. He himself knew that was his calling. [end quote]Paul's toil and giving of himself was for this reason only: so that the Gospel would actually take root in these people, and actually bring out a yield. He loved them for the Gospel's sake; he worked for the Gospel's sake.
But his purpose wasn't just for them to hear the words. It wasn't just to say something to them and let God sort it out for them. Paul says he loved them, and toiled over them, and was blameless before them, and preached the Gospel to them, and then he "exhorted each one of you and encouraged you and charged you to walk in a manner worthy of God, who calls you into his own kingdom and glory." This is his fatherly concern for them – not just that they feel good about their love for Paul, or his love for them, but that they see the God-centeredness of it, and the God-exalting power of it, as it demonstrates the power of the Gospel.
06 November 2012
I got nothing... well, almost nothing
I guess I do have this.
SCENE ONE: anxious parents pace back and forth in a hospital waiting room. Their only child fights for life in surgery. Word will come back at any moment. They alternately hold on to each other, and clutch their stomachs, sick with worry and care.
In comes their faithful shepherd, Pastor D. Zaster. His advent is preceded by a happy whistle and accompanied by a cheery smile.
"Why so gloomy?" he chirps. "God is sovereign! His purposes are sure and certain. Anything that happens today or tomorrow is just a little blip, a road bump, on the way to Christ's Kingdom. And your child? What's one child against the ages of eternity? Dead, alive, Christ is risen and the Gospel is glorious. Really, to fret is to disbelieve! Cheer up! You're making far too much of far too little!"
Our verdict? Jerk.
SCENE TWO: An anxious American expresses his fears and concerns about today's presidential election. He knows that the results will have an impact on abortion, religious liberty, national security, as well as all the matters of concern highlighted in Jeremiah 29:1ff. Romans 13:1ff., 1 Tim. 2:1ff., and 1 Pet. 2:14.
In comes Famous Religionist, chirping "Why so gloomy? God is sovereign! His purposes are sure and certain. Anything that happens today or tomorrow is just a little blip, a road bump, on the way to Christ's Kingdom. And your nation? What's one little country against the ages-long rise and fall of kingdoms? Ruined, flourishing, Christ is risen and the Gospel is glorious. Really, to fret is to disbelieve! Cheer up! You're making far too much of far too little!"
Our verdict? Deeeep. Thoughtful. Helpful. Nuanced. Positively Godicocious. Let's give him a conference so he can tell us more.
My verdict? Er, well, let's say it isn't any of that.
Before you want to tell me that a pivotal moment in American history such as this isn't worth getting worked up about, you go talk Jeremiah out of writing Lamentations and then get back to me.
And anyone who still thinks that weaving airy theologizations and rationalizations for his own blithe detachment is great and wise and godly... well, just stay well away from anyone I care about when tragedy looms.
We live in the day when Men Without Chests are carried to fame and glory by adoring masses; and any hint of criticism, any attempt at accountability for failure, any call to something better and more truly Biblical and godly and manly is punished by scolding and shaming and shunning. They are the enablers, without whom the fops would be invisible.
Ah well. Tomorrow we'll know more about what Americans have chosen to reward.
And if the news is bad, we'll have to endure the deep, nuanced, above-it-all essays from Job's friends, and the adoring sighs of their fanboys.
04 November 2012
Salt And Light
The PyroManiacs devote some space each weekend to highlights from the lifetime of works from the Prince of Preachers, Charles Haddon Spurgeon. The following excerpt is from the Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, volume 27, sermon number 1,594, "The Candle.""Saltness and light are the power of a Christian."
Yes, and bring, religion into your business, and let the light shine in the factory and in the counting-house. Then we shall not have quite so much china clay in the calicoes wherewith to cheat the foreigner, nor shall we see cheap and nasty articles described as of best quality, nor any other of the dodges in trade that everybody seems to practice now-a-days. You tradespeople and manufacturers are very much one like the other in this: there are tricks in all trades, and one sees it everywhere. I believe everybody to be honest in all England, Scotland, and Ireland until he is found out; but whether there are any so incorruptible that they will never be found wanting this deponent sayeth not, for I am not a judge.
Do not put your candle under a bushel, but let it shine, for it was intended that it should be seen. Religion ought to be as much seen at our own table as at the Lord's table. Godliness should as much influence the House of Commons as the Assembly of Divines. God grant that the day may come when the mischievous division between secular and religious things shall no more be heard of, for in all things Christians are to glorify God, according to the precept, "Whether ye eat or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God."
02 November 2012
Logos 5 has launched
I plan to share my own impressions later, but for now, here are some of the innovations in Logos 5. (I think their servers are groaning a bit right now.)
Here is a link that starts you through a series of vids on specific features of Logos 5. Let's single out a few.
Here's an overview of new features:
It comes with a nifty memorization tool:
The exegetical guide has been enhanced:
One of the pretty amazing new tools is the Timeline. Check it:
Major omissions, however, include birth of Phil Johnson and Frank Turk, and the start of Pyromaniacs. But that's what upgrades are for.
01 November 2012
Discipleship: consequences of lost focus
Building on our understanding of the Christian's fundamental self-image as a disciple, and some of the positive implications we've worked out together, I'd like to sketch out one or two of the effects of losing focus.
Or you are explaining something, and you (say) define a word, or give the word that goes in a blank. Or you suggest jotting down a reference. You repeat it, slowly and clearly, once... twice... a third time. And you see, if you're watching, many motionless hands. In fact, they may not even have taken the outline you offered, nor have brought one of their own.
So first, let me give a clear disclaimer. There may be a hundred legitimate reasons for this, truly there may. Every pastor also knows this. They range from eidetic memory, to physical writing problems of many kinds, to English as a second language, to lack of sleep, to preference for other styles of learning. For instance, to take only the latter, perhaps a worshiper prefers to experience the service as a flow, and then goes back later at home to the online mp3, with pen and paper and Bible in hand. Or the person may be a brand-new Christian and have enough of a struggle finding the Gospels, or he may know that he is not a Christian. It's never wise to assume.
HSAT, this post isn't about any of those situations. This post, as a glance back at the title would serve to remind, is about Christians who never take any of these measures simply because they do not see themselves as disciples.
A disciple never feels he knows his Bible well enough. A disciple knows that he is on a learning-curve that literally has no upper extremity. A disciple never forgets that God has expectations, that privilege obliges, that he is morally obligated to be heading to the point where he himself both practices and can explain the deeper truths of God (Heb. 5:11-14). Further, he is vividly aware that it was failure to advance in just such a way that gave birth to one of the most terrifying passages of Scripture (Heb. 6:1ff.).
"I will never need to know that" is the thought of a non-disciple. It means, "This doesn't interest me right now, so I won't make any effort to strengthen my grasp of what the Word says about it." It signals a willful ignorance of the implications of passages such as Prov. 2:1, that wisdom requires that we treasure up what we are taught right now, even though the application may not be right now. The disciple is like the hardworking, forward-looking ant (Prov. 6:8), not like the aimless sluggard (Prov. 20:4).
Let that last image haunt and motivate. Winter is coming. Need approaches. Tests loom. If we are entering the Kingdom of God at all, the path necessarily lies through many tribulations (Acts 14:22). A godly life is a persecuted life.
And you know the most dolorous aspect of tests, trials, tribulations, persecution? They rarely send advance warning. It isn't often we'll get notices such as...
- "Your lost loved one will give you a golden, perfect opening for the Gospel, if you are studied up on what God has said on Topic X; you now have three weeks to hit the books and prepare."
- "Your child is about to be savagely tempted to walk away from Christ, and you will have one shot at giving a word from God's Word, if you know what it says, so that it comes from Him and not from you. You now have two months to study up."
- "You are about to be more severely tempted to sin and shame Christ than you ever have been, and you will see it plain and clear — if you have refined your senses to discern good from evil by hard and rigorous practice. You now have one month to ready yourself."
- "A brother/sister at church will be in a severe crisis, and will give you an opening to be of critical help that (s)he will not give the elders at this point... if you have the maturity to recognize it, and the Biblical knowledge to step in to meet it. Six weeks from this second."


text:
Nailed Down
by Chelle Bliss & Eden Butler
Release Date: 20th March
Genre: Contemporary Romance
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Kit Carlyle isn't just some woman. Beautiful? Yep. Seductive? Damn straight. She's also my best friend and my co-worker. But, hell, I'm a guy with a pulse. Every once in a while, I take a look and think filthy things about her that maybe I shouldn't.
But when her cousin dies and leaves her with a long as hell and sexy bucket list, Kit turns to me for a helping hand. What can I say? I'm a sucker for a woman in need. Besides, I'm damn sure not about to let another man steal away my girl, occupy her bed, or fill my shoes. But as the stakes get higher and the items become hotter, I'll have to face the toughest challenge of all: admitting I want more than Kit's friendship.
Meet the Authors
Chelle Bliss
USA Today bestselling author Chelle Bliss currently lives in a small town near the Gulf of Mexico. She's a full-time writer, time-waster extraordinaire, social media addict, and coffee fiend. She's written over ten books and has two series available. She loves spending her free time with her boyfriend, 2 cats, and her hamster.
Eden Butler

subset: commoncrawl


text:
by Dr. Boyce Watkins
[ Henry Louis Gates, Jr. attends the premiere screening of "Faces of America With Henry Louis Gates, Jr." at Jazz at Lincoln Center on Monday, Feb. 1, 2010, in New York. (AP Photo/Evan Agostini) ]
Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. recently wrote an interesting piece for the New York Times called, "Ending the Slavery Blame Game." In the piece, Gates effectively argues that the fight for reparations is convoluted and somewhat mitigated by the fact that African elites participated in the slave trade. While describing complex business deals made between some African leadership and the Europeans who brought Africans to the New World, it almost appears as though Gates is saying that this disturbing relationship somehow undermines the right of African-Americans to hold our government accountable for its involvement in crimes committed against our people.
At very least, I am under the assumption that by "ending the slavery blame game," Gates is arguing that we should stop blaming the United States government and white America for the rape, murder, castration, lynching and beating of our ancestors.
Sorry Dr. Gates, but I must respectfully (or perhaps not so respectfully) disagree. If a young girl is sold into prostitution by her own parents, the pimp must still pay for the suffering he caused the young woman. He can't simply say, "Her parents made a deal with me, so you should stop the blame game."
In other words, the United States, as a broad and powerful industrial entity, benefited from slavery to the tune of several trillion dollars. Much of this wealth was passed down from one white man to another, and was always out of the grasp of the black men, women and children who gave their lives on American soil in order to earn it. As a result, the median net worth of the African-American family is roughly one-tenth that of white American families and we have consistently higher unemployment due to our inability to create jobs, since white Americans own most businesses.
These facts hold true without regard to how the African-American holocaust started in the first place. They also hold true because wealth and power are commodities that are passed down inter-generationally, and we missed out on all of this because we were slaves. What occurred after we left Africa can and must be considered independently from what happened while our forefathers were in the mother land.
Beyond the indisputable financial damage caused by slavery, there is also a price to be paid for pain, suffering and aggregate trauma. Even the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which abolishes slavery, has a clause stating that it's still OK to enslave another American, as long as that person has been convicted of a crime. Given that the United States incarcerates 5.8 times more black men than South Africa did during the height of apartheid, it's easy to argue that the human rights violations of American slavery continue to this day.
The arbitrary label of "convict" is used against black men in a disproportionate fashion as a loophole for American corporations to continue to profit from slave labor. I don't want to play the "blame game." But mainstream media must not play the "irresponsibility game," by promoting apologist African-American scholars who are willing to write off 400 years of systemically oppressive behavior. While the Rodney King, "Can't we all just get along?" approach makes some of us more comfortable, the truth is that America cannot become truly post-racial until it overcomes its past-racial influences.
I am not sure why Gates has gone out of his way to assuage white guilt in America. I hope that's not the price a black man must pay in order to write an op-ed in the New York Times. Perhaps his PBS specials, in which he goes out of his way to prove that he is actually from Europe, is his way of fitting into the society that never embraced the little black boy from West Virginia (Gates writes extensively about being rejected by white women as a child). Henry Louis Gates seems to have spent his entire life proving to the world that he is a "big shot," because simply being a black man may never have been quite good enough.
As Gates once wrote on his Yale University application, "As always, whitey now sits in judgment of me, preparing to cast my fate. It is your decision either to let me blow with the wind as a nonentity or to encourage the development of self. Allow me to prove myself." Gates' words remind us that the damage of oppression can be debilitating, and we can spend our entire lives overcompensating. When our spirit is torn apart by racial oppression, white acceptance and validation are sometimes necessary in order to make us whole.
Putting Henry Louis Gates to the side, a point must be clearly made. If there are African elites to be held responsible for the atrocities committed against Africans in America, then we can accept that. But while certain citizens of Africa can be found guilty for their contribution to the slave trade, America must also be held accountable for its decision to exploit slavery over the last 400 years. It's really just that simple.
24 .4. 2010


text:
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Researching Attorney Discipline


text:
John Lok / The Seattle Times
They were only moments, passing quietly through a busy childhood, but over time they revealed a harsh reality.
In the corner of the kitchen, next to a door, the Wilson family selected a wall on which to track their children's height. It wasn't much of a wall actually, a four- or five-inch-wide sliver surrounded by cabinets, but Tammy and Harrison Wilson decided it was the perfect spot.
For years, they put a kid's back against the little wall, raised a ruler to the top of his or her head and used a pencil to sketch a line accompanied by one of three initials: H, A or R. When they moved in 2008, they decided to leave behind all the markings on the wallpaper, like etchings in a cave.
An observant eye would have noticed something, though. The measurements tagged with the letter R had ended prematurely before the move.
Russell Wilson cagily made himself 6-1 on the highlights he shipped to recruiters following his sophomore year of high school. Later, he pleaded with his coach to list him at 6-0 on the official game roster.
But the wall in the kitchen never lied. By his junior season, Russell and his family stopped charting his height.
He didn't want to know anymore.
Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times
They all want something. The boy wiggled in the front row holding a Sharpie and football that barely fits under his arm. The grown man behind him who keeps shouting a never-ending chorus of "Russell! Russell!" The middle-aged woman who doesn't appear to have anything to sign except her Seahawks shirt. They crane forward, hold out footballs and jerseys, yell, call his name, beg almost.
On the field below, inside Tacoma's Cheney Stadium, stands Wilson, the center of their universe at the moment. More than seven thousand fans pack the minor-league baseball stadium 63 days before the season opener for Richard Sherman's celebrity softball game, and a large number decide to stick around for a chance at a more intimate moment. A signature. A high-five. Even eye contact.
This season, Wilson moves from underdog darling to front-runner, an inevitable metamorphosis after his rookie year. How he carries that weight, how he handles adjusted definitions of failure and success, could mean as much as his on-field preparation.
"He's dug himself a big hole," says former North Carolina State teammate Owen Spencer, "but that's where he's supposed to be. The next question is, What about next year? Can he repeat? Is he going to hit the wall, or is he going to do something that will make the media question his whole persona?"
By 5 p.m. at Cheney Stadium, though, it's time to leave and Wilson makes his way down the three dugout steps. Arms holding out jerseys and footballs form a tunnel. As he moves up a hallway toward a door marked "authorized personnel only," one man drops a football onto the concrete floor, a final effort to get Wilson to sign.
And then, seconds later, Russell Wilson is gone.
Here's a Senior Bowl story: Daniel Jeremiah is a scout with the Philadelphia Eagles at the time. One of the players he's assigned to talk to is Russell Wilson. Scouts are supposed to ask players for their agent's name and number after interviews, but this time is different. Wilson asks Jeremiah for his number. That has never happened. By the time he drives back to his hotel, a text is waiting: "Mr. Jeremiah, thanks for visiting with me. I enjoyed our talk, and I know I can help the Eagles win." Jeremiah is blown away. "Now," he says, "I hate the fact that because he came in under 5-11, I dropped my personal grade to the third round."
Wilson and Spencer used to go to a Chinese restaurant in Raleigh called Red Dragon. Most of the time they wouldn't wear N.C. State gear. The idea was to detach from football, even if only for a quick meal.
"But in my mind, he was always thinking about football," Spencer says. "Always, always, always. It was like a cologne. He just had it on him."
Now that singular focus will be tested by the soaring expectations placed on his team and himself. He enters a crossroads of his pro career. He's not only expected to be better from a year ago but guide his team to the Super Bowl.
Rarely has so much been asked of a quarterback so quickly.
In August last year, not long before coach Pete Carroll named him the team's starter, Wilson called Seattle Children's hospital. He introduced himself to the staff on the other end because they didn't really know who he was.
Eve Kopp from Seattle Children's remembers her reaction: "Who's this guy? Here's another player that basically wants to look at the kids like a zoo and come visit once and then renege on his offer."
Wilson upheld his end of the agreement every Tuesday last season. This year, in a sign of the times, he has already filmed segments with ESPN from inside the hospital. What's easy to overlook are the commitments, let alone the demands, saddled on Wilson. There are team meetings, practices, film study sessions, interviews with local media, interviews with national media, public appearances, youth camps and endorsement obligations.
"When he brought his wife the last time before Christmas," Kopp says, "that was going to be the only time he and his wife were going to have dinner that week together. They were asking for a restaurant nearby so we told them to go to Jak's Grill, which is about two blocks away and that was literally the only dinner they were going to have together that week."
When Mike Holmgren, the former Seahawks coach, met Wilson, Holmgren emphasized two points. The first: Learn to say no. Wilson will be flooded with speaking requests, endorsements, all the extra attention that comes with hype. He will need to pick his moments judiciously. The second point won't materialize until the season actually starts.
"The challenge for you," Holmgren told him, "will be how you handle things when they don't go just according to plan next year."
Not everyone is convinced of Wilson's imminent stardom. In June, ESPN.com's Jeffri Chadiha wrote, "Of all the young star quarterbacks coming off breakout seasons, he still has more to prove than any of his peers." Wilson didn't face the national scrutiny of Robert Griffin III, the pressure of replacing Peyton Manning like Andrew Luck or the controversy that surrounded Colin Kaepernick's midseason insertion. Chadiha quoted an anonymous quarterbacks coach, who said: "I like the kid, but he also was playing with a top-five defense and a top-five running game. It helps a lot when you don't have to throw the football 35 times a game."
A myth surrounds Wilson and his height.
His appeal, the common thinking goes, is his every-man quality. He's shorter than 6 feet, either our height or in many cases smaller. He looks like us. Not only that but he didn't get drafted until the third round and look how well he's doing.
As former North Carolina State coach Tom O'Brien said, Wilson is "an American success story."
But Wilson's true appeal is that he's so much different. He has managed to give off the Average Joe vibe, and therefore we like him even more, but in reality he is not.
Tyler Brosius, a backup quarterback at N.C. State, made the same mistake. Growing up in North Carolina, he heard all about the blossoming legend of Russell Wilson. "Pretty much a religious icon if you can believe that," he says.
Brosius showed up in the summer and worked out with the other incoming freshmen. He didn't catch a glimpse of Wilson, a junior, until the quarterback jogged onto the practice field the first day of camp.
"Excuse my French," Brosius says, "but I was like, 'Oh [expletive], this is Russell? This guy is Russell Wilson?' I was looking over No. 16 to see if Russell was going to come behind him, like no way is this kid THE Russell Wilson everyone drools over."
He laughs. "And then as soon as the first couple snaps happened, I said, 'This is Russell Wilson.'"
Wilson is the shortest quarterback in the league at 5-11, and only two other starters – Michael Vick and Drew Brees – check in under 6 feet 1. Of the 131 quarterbacks listed on the NFL.com's database, only Seneca Wallace joins Wilson as a sub-6-footer.
But the idea of Wilson as a guy beating the odds is misleading.
"He has gifts," says Dana Bible, Wilson's offensive coordinator at N.C. State. "He is not an overachiever. He's not somebody that's made something out of nothing. That's not the story at all."
Gerry Broome / The Associated Press
Then there's this: Wilson couldn't get invited to the NFL combine. Not after he decided to leave North Carolina State with one year of eligibility left. O'Brien and his staff reached out to old contacts. They called coaches. They called general managers.
"We called everybody," O'Brien said. "They said he was a wide receiver – at best."
Wilson was invited to the combine after his year at Wisconsin, but the questions didn't let up. In the days before the draft, there were stories wondering if he would get drafted at all or if he should focus on baseball.
To hear people around the game talk about Wilson now is to hear them talk about how talented he was, how he had all the immeasurables but just not the most obvious measurable: his height. The common line is that they had no one to compare him to, and so they dropped his pre-draft grades despite liking everything else about him.
What they saw, they insist, were the tools to be a good quarterback, height be damned.
A frequent knock on short quarterbacks is that they lack arm strength. Wilson's arm is big enough to make all the throws, like the off-balance 50-yard strike he threw to Doug Baldwin against the Patriots last year.
"It's like a golfer on the PGA Tour who's 5-9, 170 pounds but hits the ball 350 yards," says Rich Gannon, a former NFL quarterback.
The other knock on short quarterbacks: They can't see over linemen to read the field and get too many balls batted down. Wilson has never struggled in that area.
"He's so good at finding throwing lanes," Brosius says. "You can be 6 feet 10 and still throwing into the linemen. It's all about throwing lanes, and he knows the game so well and so naturally that he can just scoot over and find that throwing lane. It's beautiful actually watching him play."
He is fast enough that many colleges recruited him as a defensive back, but he is a quarterback who can run and not a running quarterback. He was an intriguing enough baseball player that the Colorado Rockies drafted him in the fourth round. And he has giant hands.
Around the time the Wilson family stopped measuring his height, they started measuring hand size, and it wasn't long before his hands outgrew those of his dad and older brother. "I'm 6 foot 5," says Mark Palyo, an assistant coach at Collegiate when Wilson played. "And when you shake his hand, it engulfs yours."
When he does take off running, he is shifty enough to make linebackers miss and smart enough to avoid big hits. He slides when he needs to and steps out of bounds along the sideline, all subtleties people in the game point to as maturity: A healthy Russell Wilson is far more valuable than a banged-up one who fought for a couple extra yards.
"He never takes off the same way," says NFL Network analyst Charles Davis. "He's like a chess player who is always a few moves ahead."
Leigh Steinberg, the former super-agent who represented franchise quarterbacks Troy Aikman, Warren Moon and Drew Bledsoe, draws a comparison to another one of his old clients: Steve Young.
From the on-site studio at the Senior Bowl, NFL Network analyst Charles Davis notices something strange. "Hey," Davis punches in to his producer, "do you have a camera on Russell Wilson when he isn't in?" Here's what Davis and the cameras see: Every time Wilson isn't in, he pretends to take a snap and mirror the play behind the line of scrimmage at half speed. Bootlegs, handoffs, toss sweeps, pass plays. Davis has never seen that. "That leadership thing? It's real," he says. "There's an extra charisma gene he carries around that most of us don't have."
Jim Zorn
After going 2-12 in inaugural season, Seahawks set then-record for most wins (5) by a second-year expansion team.
|Pass yards
Dave Krieg
After leading Seattle to AFC title game, Krieg started all next season and made the Pro Bowl.
|Pass yards
Rick Mirer
Set NFL rookie records for attempts, completions and yards, but struggled after that.
|Pass yards
Jon Kitna
Tacoma native guided the Seahawks to AFC West title in 1999 before losing his grip on the starting job.
|Pass yards
John Lok / The Seattle Times
Wilson and veteran quarterback Brady Quinn spent many early mornings this offseason preparing for the game before the snap.
Live, to most viewers, a play appears to be one cluster of movement. The quarterback's job is to decipher much of the action before it ever happens. The talk about quarterbacks tends to focus on their ability to make progressions, to look from receiver A to B to C. But rarely do they have enough time to do that.
The key, Eli Manning once said, is to eliminate receivers before the ball is even snapped.
Quinn says quarterbacks have a protocol, a list of objectives they must quickly run through when they break the huddle. The reason Wilson has been successful so far, Quinn says, is that he's been so thorough in his preparation, so repetitive in practice, he doesn't leave much to chance.
"The game is all about leverage," Quinn says. "What you're looking for is leverage, the guys who should win based on their route and where the leverage is with that defender. There are certain guys where you're able to say, 'I'm not going to look there' before the snap.
"You have one, two seconds and then you're running or something is happening. It's hard to really get through a complete progression with the type of athletes you're seeing up front nowadays. But there's no hesitation with Russell because he knows he's right in the protocol."
By now, the stories of his work ethic and drive have entered a near hyperbolic status.
At Wisconsin, he carried a ring of note cards so when he had five minutes before an interview, he could study plays. When he talked with former NFL coach Jon Gruden on ESPN before the draft, he said he arrived at Wisconsin on July 1 and expected to learn the Badgers' offense by July 21. "You know what?" former offensive coordinator Paul Chryst says. "He did."
After an exhibition game at Kansas City last year, the Seahawks returned to the team's facility in Renton in the early morning. While most players quickly headed for their cars, Wilson studied film for a couple hours as the equipment staff toiled away.
Brosius, one of Wilson's understudies at N.C. State, noticed Wilson didn't seem to do as well at practice as he did in games. His theory: He was using that time to process everything a step slower so when it was time to play, he could let his training and instincts take over.
John Lok / The Seattle Times
There's a story Annabelle Myers, the sports information director at N.C. State, likes to tell. Not long after the NFL draft, Wilson sent her a text message. In it, he told her he would win the starting job and be named rookie of the year. But before Myers passes along the text, which she has saved on her phone, she wants to check with someone first.
"I want to ask Russell," she says. "I don't want to do anything that would embarrass him, so let me ask him if that's OK. He's so humble. That sounds kind of like an oxymoron because he's bragging and then he's humble, but that's just not how it was intended."
There's a sense that Wilson is always prepared, always on. Boring, Myers calls him. The next time he slips up in an interview or in public will be the first time – and a shock to those who have spent significant time around him.
"Russell is very sweet, but he's not easy to get to know," Myers says. "He's the nicest guy you'll ever meet, but I don't know if a whole lot of people ever get close to him."
His teammates in Seattle have plenty of fun with his stonewall demeanor. There's even a hilarious segment from last season on "The Real Rob Report," the inside-the-locker-room show filmed by fullback Michael Robinson, in which offensive lineman John Moffitt begins a quest to find out if Wilson is a robot. The hunt ends with Moffitt discovering electrical tape, a screw driver and paint that Moffitt says "could be his skin tone" inside Wilson's locker.
"You know," Myers says, "he's the kind of guy who if he didn't do everything the right way, I'm not sure other guys would like him very much."
Courtesy Collegiate School
Yet either because of all that or despite it, there's something magnetic about him, people will tell you.
In his one season at Wisconsin, Wilson cultivated a fan base so devoted many still eagerly track his progress. "There are two guys in this state who walk on water," says Brian Lucas, Wisconsin's director of athletic communications. "J.J. Watt and Russell Wilson." Watt, a star defensive lineman for the Houston Texans, grew up in Wisconsin. Wilson was there six months.
Brosius, who spent a year with Wilson and doesn't keep in touch with him, goes a step further: "I feel honored to say that I actually played football with Russell Wilson."
But there's an underlying truth to all of this: None of it matters if Wilson doesn't win.
As soon as N.C. State beats rival North Carolina, Wilson turns and flings the ball into the student section. And then it hits him: There's someone who deserves the ball more. Bible, the offensive coordinator, isn't on the sideline or in the press box. He's in a North Carolina hospital. The Friday before, doctors told him he had cancer. Leukemia. When Wilson realizes his mistake, he sends staffers into the stands to retrieve the ball, then gives it to Bible, although Bible isn't exactly sure how it gets to him. "I should know that," he says, his voice tightening. "I just know that for the last three or four years that ball wasn't five feet from me every day. And it had very little to do with beating North Carolina. It had everything to do with being a part of a North Carolina State team."
At his passing academy on the campus of the University of Washington in July, a group of 30 campers and parents huddle outside a tent. Inside, Wilson is posing for the final few pictures with campers after nearly an hour. The group outside has waited at least that long, maybe longer.
Eventually, Wilson steps through the tent flaps and is instantly swarmed. He smiles, just a little. He looks tired.
"OK," he says, "but just one item each, guys, OK? I've got to get to a meeting."
A black Mercedes SUV is waiting to the side. Wilson stands and signs every item. He takes a picture with every camper. He also takes pictures with staffers and four college kids who stumbled by in their swimsuits. One boy, with Wilson's signature on the back of his white shirt, walks away with his family, stunned. "I can't believe that just happened," he says.
What's often left unsaid but is clear is this: His rise comes with certain terms. He could become the most revered athlete in the city's history, and that is a burden he will carry throughout his career. But that also comes with gnawing scrutiny, the kind that will place him in a bubble and hound his every step. The only thing as insatiable as our need to build up a hero is our thirst to tear one down.
Now we will see if Russell Wilson can measure up.
Jayson Jenks: 206-464-8277 or email@example.com


text: Daryl Henderson is a fashion lifestyle, editorial, and travel photographer. He first picked up a camera when he was 5 years old, and spent his childhood exploring and snapping pictures in the woods in Virginia. As soon as he turned 18, his adventurous spirit led him to move all over the East Coast, before landing more permanently in LA. Daryl's ability to capture the ephemeral beauty and playful spirit of life has landed him clients such as America's Next Top Model, Conde Nast, InStyle, Nylon Magazine, and Team One. Whether he is photographing a street scene in Granada, Spain, or a model in New York, his deep love for the art of image making is evident, and his photographs leave a lasting imprint on viewers hearts. Name: Daryl Henderson Nickname: D Q: How old are you? A: None of your business. Q: How old were you when you got your first camera? A: Five years old Q: How long have you been taking photographs? A: I am not telling you how old I am Q: Ok, then how long have you been taking photographs professionally? A: About 12 years now Q: What kinds of images make you think "damn, I wish I had created that."? A: Usually, images that are clever, well executed, and makes me feel something. For example, Nick Knight's work with flowers or Richard Avedon's portraits of the American West are stunning. Q: What inspires you artistically on a daily basis? A: Simply put, I am a lover of light..... and color. The way they interact on infinite surfaces in a constant source of inspiration. Q: If you could use your photography to impact one area of society what would you choose? A: I believe we are all equals. To that affect I want my work to cross boundaries and bring people closer together. To have a conversation, to laugh, or just to feel something. So to answer more clearly, I would choose to impact society as a whole. Q: If you could shoot anywhere in the world where would it be? A: Antarctica Q: Why there? A: Because it is one of those places most people will never get to go to. Q: If you couldn't do photography, what else would you do? A: What do you mean what else would I do? I would draw pictures, or paint them, or make them move. Basically I would keep making pictures Q: Where do you see yourself in ten years? A: On a beach somewhere in Thailand getting a massage and drinking a tasty beverage. Oh you mean for work? In ten years I'll be doing what I'm doing now. Playing with new technology and mixing it with the old to create still and moving imagery.


text:
McInerney, MacMath Lead Union Past Fire 1-0
BRIDGEVIEW, Ill. (AP) — Jack McInerney scored his league-leading seventh goal of the season Saturday and Zac MacMath made six saves to lead the Philadelphia Union to a 1-0 victory over the Chicago Fire.
McInerney took a 35-yard pass from substitute Sebastien Le Toux in the 75th minute, danced around defender Jalil Anibaba and slipped the ball by diving goalkeeper Sean Johnson.
The victory was the first in three matches for Philadelphia (4-3-3) and only the second in its last seven games. It was the fourth loss for the Fire (2-6-1) in the last six matches and the second straight game without a goal. Chicago has been shut out in five of its nine matches this MLS season.
This was MacMath's second shutout of the season, with Chicago's best chances coming from midfield. He kicked away Dan Paladini's point-blank boot in the 33rd minute and made a diving stop on Quincy Amarikwa in the 95th minute to seal the victory.
(© Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)
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text:
"The charm of Kettlewell is an abiding charm, and to those of us whose life is spent amid the hurley-burley of city life, the village seems the peculiar abode of peace and quiet beauty; its limestone terraces, with their fringes of hazel and rowan coppices give to the district a characteristic beauty. But the special glory of Kettlewell is not that of colour, but of line. Situated at the junction of the main valley of the Wharfe with side valley, which descend from the Coverhead Pass, Kettlewell is the converging point of many contour lines, and to the eye which delights in the flow and ripple of sky line there is a beauty in Kettlewell which is all its own."
This was written nearly one hundred years ago by Professor Moorman but is as true today as it was then.
Today there is a Hotel and two Inns offering quality accommodation and good food. The great tradition of the B&B lives on, offering quality accommodation and of course, that sizzling fresh cooked Yorkshire breakfast. You can also choose to stay in one of the attractive self-catering cottages.
Walkers are spoilt for choice with some of the best walking in the Dales, from energetic fell walking to a gentle stroll along the river. Cyclists can explore quiet country lanes and peaceful Dales villages.
Afterwards you can have a tempting cup of tea or visit the shops where you can buy anything from walking boots to a loaf of bread or that special gift to remind you of your visit to the Dales, you will be guaranteed a warm welcome everywhere you go.
So come and visit Kettlewell and we know you will come back time and time again.


text:
The Internet's Future Depends on Maintaining Its Free Spirit
A great deal has happened in the 50 years since J.C.R. Licklider wrote his famous "Inter-Galactic Network" memo—the first conception of what eventually became the Internet—in April 1963.
Perhaps the most profound observation made about the early Internet was that it was unlikely to spread across the globe. And yet, slowly at first, and faster with the advent of the World Wide Web, the Internet has found purchase on every continent–even Antarctica. This penetration is a consequence of the independent decisions made by hundreds of thousands of Internet operators whose business models range from nonprofit to for-profit to government operated and every other variation you can imagine.
But a meeting of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), taking place in Dubai this week, threatens to stifle further Internet expansion and innovation.
The protocols that fuel the Internet emerged from research sponsored by the U.S. Defense Department and later the U.S. National Science Foundation. Eventually, research and development found support from the private sector and non-U.S. governments around the world. The standards that underpin the Internet created an interoperable platform and framework that allowed anyone to implement a piece of the network and try to find someone willing to interconnect.
One secret to the Internet's success has been its "loosely coupled" character. In other words, no one was coerced to join or use it or to implement it. Interconnection of the networks of the Internet was accomplished under bilateral or multilateral agreements among the implementing entities. The freedom to choose the equipment, software, services, and business models has been key to the widespread investment in Internet infrastructure. The Internet protocol itself is only loosely coupled to the underlying transport, giving rise to the slogan "IP on everything!" (pun intended). The fact that the packets don't know what they are carrying as payload is another loose coupling: only the endpoints in the net need to understand the meaning of the bits in the packets—the network can stay blissfully unaware of the meaning of the packet payloads. This feature allows the creation of new applications without altering the underlying network.
Freedom of expression—to speak and be heard—is enshrined in the Declaration of Universal Human Rights, and the Internet, along with the World Wide Web, has become a strong enabler of these rights. The advent of Internet-enabled mobile phones has enhanced the power of the Internet and empowered users around the world.
One of the most interesting aspects of the Internet's development and evolution is the creation of a variety of bottom-up institutions dedicated to maintaining and evolving Internet's functionality and capacity. The Internet Configuration Control Board (ICCB), created in 1979, became the Internet Activities Board around 1984 and, upon the creation of the Internet Society under whose auspices it operates, morphed into the Internet Architecture Board in 1992.
The Internet Engineering Task Force is a multi-stakeholder organization first convened in 1986. You can't even "join"—all you can do is show up and participate. The Internet Society is an umbrella organization with many chapters around the world with open membership—you don't have to pay to be a member of the global organization. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was created in 1998 with a distinctly multi-stakeholder charter and structure allowing the technical community, private sector, civil society, and governments to participate as equal partners in policy development for Internet address and domain name assignments.
The five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) were created over a period of time, some preceding the creation of ICANN. They, too, are multi-stakeholder—the public is welcome to attend all meetings. Only members can vote to elect board and advisory council members, but anyone can participate in the discussions and the assessment of consensus on policy matters.
The point is that bottom-up, multi-stakeholder models are far better suited to Internet policy development than purely intergovernmental processes such as those typical of international treaty organizations. Governments should be involved, and they have important responsibilities to their citizens, but the voice of all affected stakeholders should have weight in policy development. For these and many other reasons, I believe that the freedom of the Internet must be protected and defended through institutions that, themselves, exhibit the openness that we all benefit from on the Internet today.
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text:
Why 1969 was great. Why 2008 is great:
In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon's hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview about peace. 38 years later, Jerry has produced a film about it. Using the original interview recording as the soundtrack, director Josh Raskin has woven a visual narrative which tenderly romances Lennon's every word in a cascading flood of multipronged animation. Raskin marries the terrifyingly genius pen work of James Braithwaite with masterful digital illustration by Alex Kurina, resulting in a spell-binding vessel for Lennon's boundless wit, and timeless message.
Hi-res version also available.
Thanks Tim Lesle


text:
Thought Starters provides me with a chance to look through the articles, research and opinion pieces I've read, highlighting interesting trends, developments and changes in the world you and I live in. This edition looks at the global hubs for venture capital, blockchains ups and downs, Facebook's success and challenges and Amazon's move from retailer to service provider among other trends and insights.
A profile of Martin Prosperity Institute points to the dominance the US has in venture capital with London ranking 7th among metropolitan centres:
There's been a lot of talk of the potential for blockchain technologies to upend the incumbents in the financial services sector, but the major banks are beginning to make themselves known. Tanaya Macheel profiles different blockchain based initiatives by some of the major American banks which includes attempts to patent innovations in a sector previously associated closely with open source technology:
Keeping on the blockchain theme, Timothy B. Lee profiles the growing pains that Bitcoin is experiencing as growing demand challenges the infrastructure of the technology as it currently stands:
The Bitcoin community is currently locked in a debate about whether to follow that same trajectory: whether to grow quickly at the cost of possibly becoming more centralized. The difference is that the way the Bitcoin network works means that early adopters have an effective veto over further growth. If a critical mass of Bitcoin stakeholders refuse to accept larger blocks, the Bitcoin network could be stuck with its current, limited capacity for years to come.
WhatsApp has done a great job of expanding its reach which has seen it recently pass the 1 billion user maker despite having only 57 engineers. What the mobile messaging platform has been less successful in doing is monetising its user base compared to Line and WeChat as Terence Lee reports although there are indications this is likely to change:
Amazon is one organisation that has done a great job of monetising its platform, moving from a bare bones online retailer to a dominant player in retail providing a range of ecommerce related services to third parties (see illustration below). This ties in nicely with a recent Jan Dawson blog post where he stresses the need for providers to absorb as many activities as possible (eg Facebook) or alternatively be on as many domains as possible (eg Uber):
An interesting recent development in Amazon's strategy is its experiment with the opening of a physical store in Seattle with reports that they plan on rolling out 300 to 400 stores across the US in the future.
Tal Shachar with Liam Boluk point to the growing glut of content that consumers face across a range of media and with this comes the growing issue of discovery and opportunities for content curation. Sentiments further echoed in a recent post by Benedict Evans:
WeAreSocial have recently published the Digital in 2016 report, providing a range of digital benchmark statistics including internet, mobile internet, social media and mobile app usage along with a range of other indicators. Well worth bookmarking for future use:
It's financial results season in the US with recent announcements from Apple, Alphabet and Facebook. One of the interesting points to emerge from Facebook's results is how well the company has transitioned to a mobile first company since 2010 as Alice Truong reports:
Where Facebook has been less successful is in the launch of its Free Basics offering in India. The service looks to offer free access to limited selection of mobile optimised content to mobile users but has come into fierce opposition from net neutrality campaigners in India according to Lauren Smiley's report:
Free Basics only serves a tiny Facebook-endorsed portion of the Internet to users for free — a "walled garden" as opponents call it — while users must pay to access anything else on the web. As Backchannel has been chronicling for some time, they see it as a violation of the principle of net neutrality, that all things on the internet should be treated the same to preserve competition: no faster data connection for deep-pocketed companies, no charging consumers for some sites but not others, no cordoning off slices of the internet by private companies.
Sometimes the internet doesn't prove quite as virtual as you'd imagine. Dan Wang profiles the physical delivery of data to servers around the world by content delivery networks (CDNs) as a means of speeding up the delivery of content to internet users in a curious mix of the physical and the virtual:
So instead of using the Internet to transfer big pieces of data, companies have turned to the global freight network. High-traffic websites copy data onto hard drives (which are no bigger than what you'd use to back up your laptop), pack them into cardboard boxes, and then fly them around the world. They can be in a box in the belly of a passenger plane, right beside cartons full of iPhones.
Business Insider profiles the digital habits of American teens. Whilst the sample size of 60 is a far from representative sample, it does provide some interesting insights into the habits of younger consumers:
Alexander J. Motyl warns of a Russian collapse, fueled by an economy hamstrung by its dependence on a declining petroleum market and a political system resistant to change and reform:
The problem for Putin—and for Russia—is that the political–economic system is resistant to change. Such a dysfunctional economy is sustainable only if it is controlled by a self-serving bureaucratic caste that places its own interests above those of the country. In turn, a deeply corrupt authoritarian system needs to have a dictator at its core, one who coordinates and balances elite interests and appetites. Putin's innovation is to have transformed himself into a cult-like figure whose legitimacy depends on his seemingly boundless youth and vigor. Such leaders, though, eventually become victims of their own personality cult and, like Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Mussolini, do not leave office voluntarily. Russia is thus trapped between the Scylla of systemic decay and the Charybdis of systemic stasis. Under such conditions, Putin will draw increasingly on Russian chauvinism, imperialism, and ethnocentrism for legitimacy.
Ben Judah recently published This is London: Life and Death in the World City, taking the approach of a foreign correspondent to reporting on the experience of immigrants in his home city. His interview in London School of Economics' lecture series is well worth a listen for anyone interested in the experience and impact of London's many immigrant communities:
The featured image is a CT mural from Torino published in ekosystem.