This is a great Passive Aggressive series of notes documenting printer frustration and odd dreams…
Author: Nathan Campbell
Nathan runs St Eutychus. He loves Jesus. His wife. His daughter. His son. His other daughter. His dog. Coffee. And the Internet. He is the pastor of City South Presbyterian Church, a church in Brisbane, a graduate of Queensland Theological College (M. Div) and the Queensland University of Technology (B. Journ). He spent a significant portion of his pre-ministry-as-a-full-time-job life working in Public Relations, and now loves promoting Jesus in Brisbane and online. He can't believe how great it is that people pay him to talk and think about Jesus. If you'd like to support his writing financially you can do that by giving to his church.
More on Copyright
Mikey linked to this article by his fellow Tasweigian – Will – who wrote a thoughtful piece on a Christian approach to Copyright that I agree with most of.
Except for the bit where he makes a distinction between tangible and intangible assets. Which I have a problem with. We have turned the intangible into a commodity. Ideas are worth money. Entertainment is big business. Companies rise and fall on the back of protecting ideas. Creativity is worth money. And while Will asserts that borrowing someone’s story does not constitute a violation of commandment number eight – I would suggest that there are ways that it can.
Sermon illustrations are a grey area. I’ve never had one pinched. But I know people who have. I think there’s enough out there without stealing people’s real life anecdotes and presenting them as your own. There’s a place for appropriate attribution.
But, as I’ve indicated in discussions both here, and elsewhere, I sympathise with Will’s position.
“IP restrictions in general are bad for Christian proclamation. I listen, watch and read widely as I prepare my sermons. I have been known to, ahem, “borrow” an illustration or two. I have been known to read quotes from books in order to make a point. God help us if these sources were to stand on their IP rights. “
And I find this statement interesting…
“The Biblical practice of remuneration for gospel work is primarily one of patronage – a stipend, gift, donation so that you may be free to give of yourself, not a wage so that you can earn your keep. “
It has implications for the way we approach our own rights in the context of our ministry.
Andrew Katay has been posting about the nature of remuneration for ministry.
I came to the conclusion elsewhere (in one of my old posts linked below) that the church has a responsibility to pay its financial dues to those whose work it uses, and workers have the responsibility to live out the gospel and serve the body with their gifts.
I think when we want to use someone else’s IP, even when they have sacrified their right to that IP, we should be attributing it to them. While I believe all exercises of spiritual gifts to be spiritually inspired I think acknowledging the work and contribution of the person is the right thing to do. So I’d draw the line at stealing personal sermon illustrations without attribution to the person. If it’s a good illustration it should cope with the attribution without falling over in a pile of steaming awfulness.
Copyright is a complex mix of ethics, law, and theology. Here are some great resources for thinking through the issue…
Simone is a Christian songwriter of repute – she posted about copyright, song writing, and changing song lyrics. She got lots of comments. And she posted a follow up.
Communicate Jesus has a bunch of great posts about copyright for churches, and a post for Christian creatives to consider how they can generously give of their abilities. Steve from Communicate Jesus also points out that it’s illegal to screen YouTube videos in church without a CCLI video license (CVLI) or consent from the video’s producer.
This PDF is a handy guide to copyright for churches.
And here are my previous thoughts on the matter…
Hopefully some of these links will prove helpful for anyone traversing the murky waters of copyright and IP in the church.
On stupid guilt inducing status updates
Dear Christian Facebookers,
If you feel the need to inspire your Christian brothers and sisters to guilt please do so in a fitting and clever manner.
Do not post gut wrenching hallmark inspired guilt trips in your status and encourage other people to do the same.
If you post this:
“is a follower of Christ and proud to say it!! Let’s see how many people on FB aren’t afraid to show their love for God! Repost this as your status. Each time you see this on someone’s status, say a quick prayer for that person!! Lets get God back in this country like He should be!!! If you agree post this in your status update. Just copy and paste.”
I won’t unfriend you. But I will block your statuses from appearing in my news feed, and I will think a little less of you.
Even if it’s just because you used so many exclamation marks.
Mikey has good rules for Facebook Status Updates. Obey them.
UPDATE: There were several instances of this in my feed – this was not directed at anyone in particular – unless you were the culprit who instigated this practice to begin with…
On Twilight, feminism, and ethics
Back in July Amy gave quite a reasonable point of view on the damage Twilight might do to young girls.
Here’s what she said…
“I am really worried about the worldview this presents to teenage girls (say 13 and 14 year olds). A lot of people in (US) Christian circles are jumping on Twilight as being okay for their kids to read (unlike Harry Potter – but you don’t want to get me started on how shortsighted that is) because they think it supports abstinence (which honestly, it really doesn’t – not having sex because you might kill someone is a lot different to choosing to for moral reasons).”
“Almost as soon as Bella meets Edward, she decides to give up college or any idea of a normal life (including seeing her family), so she can become undead like him. That’s right girls – find the right guy and just get him to look after you. You won’t ever have to think about looking after yourself.”
An opinion writer from the Herald has essentially regurgitated the same point of view.
She celebrates characters from chick literature of the past – like the girls from Little Women and Anne of Green Gables…
For more than a century, Jo March and Anne Shirley have been teaching little girls that there is more to life than hooking up with a rich, handsome bloke. Now, in 2009, we have a heroine who tells them that it’s worth their family, their education and their soul.
But in the same piece presents an interesting ethical dilemma as though it’s a fait accompli…
“They conceive a half-vampire, half-human child. Baby vampires are particularly dangerous, apparently, as they have as little restraint as any baby and have been known to slaughter entire cities when they’re hungry. But with customary thoughtlessness and confused morality, Bella refuses to have an abortion. Her decision puts a lot of people to a lot of trouble.”
Assuming, for a moment, that vampires are real… why is this refusal to have an abortion framed in such black and white terms? It would seem to be more complex than that…
Things that make me grumpy!
I have a pet hate. I hate a particular sub-species of grammar nazi. Well, a couple of sub-species actually.*
I hate it when I write perfectly parsed, syntaxed and phrased quotes to be included in a third party’s media release and they come back changed.
I especially hate it when that change includes the addition of an exclamation mark, or a change of spelling (program v programme) because your style guide is stuck in the mother country.
You may think you’re a better writer than me, you may be a better writer than me – but don’t ask for my help and then bastardise my quotes with awful punctuation.
If you do this I will laugh at you when nobody comes to your press conference – even though you waste almost an hour of my CEO’s time.
That is all.
*I also have a mild disdain for the Grammar SS, those Grammar Nazis who run around pulling people up with a public rebuke for a grammatical error. If it’s an issue for you at least have the courtesy to raise a mistake in private rather than trumpeting your grammatical superiority via a snarky comment. It may be that the mistake is an innocent typo.
Become a mathlete, impress nobody
I don’t want to pretend to be all that interested in maths. I’m not. But I am interested in party tricks. Especially party tricks that make me look smart.
Here’s Wired’s collection of mathematics hacks to impress your friends (except the friends of yours who have maths degrees who don’t like jokes about e^x. That’s you Benny. Dan has a maths degree and he liked my jokes…
“To multiply, say, 11 x 32, add the digits of 32 (3 + 2 = 5) and insert the sum between them: 352. Numbers with two-digit sums use a slight variation: For 11 x 84 (8 + 4 = 12), add the 1 from 12 to the 8 and leave the 2 in the middle: 924. “
How to really mess up your kid
d’Armond Speers is obviously a bit angry at the name his parents gave him. So he decided to seriously mess up his son’s life by speaking to him exclusively in Klingon for the first three years of his life.
“I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language,” Speers told the Minnesota Daily. “He was definitely starting to learn it.”
Luckily for the kid, it seems is all turned out ok…
As for Speers, who still gets nostalgic when he recalls singing the Klingon lullaby “May the Empire Endure” with his son at bedtime, the experiment was a dud. His son is now in high school and doesn’t speak a word of Klingon.
Although some of the things he’s done lead people to believe he’s a “Star Trek” fanatic, Speers said it’s actually a passion for language that attracts him to Klingon.
Back to school
Tonight is the second installment of my birthday present to Robyn. We’re going to round two of cooking school at Townsville’s De Studi kitchen shop.
Round one – Moroccan – was a smash hit. Robyn has already produced delicious Lamb Sigaras since. I will post the recipe one day… but first… the cook off…
There wasn’t a whole lot of interactivity in the classes – we were able to fill, and roll, our “sigara”, which is some sort of language for cigar shaped filo pastry thing stuffed with sensational lamb mince…
Someone already made my shirt…
There’s nothing new under the sun…
They don’t have Optimus Prime though…
Oh well. Voting for getting my shirt designed will open if/when Threadless approves it…
A performing fartist
Let it never be said that I have standards. I present to you… Mr Methane, Britain’s premier flatulist. His website has annoying music. But it’s not as bad as this video.
Theological Smackdown: The end is the beginning is the end
The last few weeks of Westminster Confession of Faith classes (WCFC) left me feeling a little bit like Hulk Hogan at a press conference…
We’ve changed the order somewhat due to the absence of our venerated leader, who for some reason decided that stuff about end times would be less controversial than stuff about the sacraments.
He was wrong. The chapters on the state of men after death and the resurrection and the one on the Last Judgment ended up being pretty heated.
The judgment study got bogged down in the question of whether Christians go through the process of judgment to be found innocent – or if we skip the process altogether.
It was a case of the one proof text verse the many proof texts – and both sides of the debate walked away thinking they’d won and the other side were idiots.
Our group features some John Macarthur fanboys (surely a breed as rabid as my posse of Mark Driscoll fanboys), who are very rigidly stuck on the idea that dispensational premillennialism is the only way to understand end times.
I’m not one of them. They told me I don’t understand Revelation. Or the Bible. I told them that Calvin was an amillenialist. It got a little ugly.
For some reason they also hold Revelation to be the most important book of the Bible. It’s like a trump card that can be played to render all perspicuous passages of Scripture relating to the same topic unclear at the sake of a fringe interpretation of a complex book.
The millennium sure is a curious little issue to think about – but at the end of the day it’s not a salvation issue. And we have freedom to disagree.
I think it matters though – because it’s the vocal fringe that brand Christianity as a bunch of crazies – and if you have a look at Christian cults – you’ll find that most of them subscribe to a premillennial eschatology. This may or may not be a strawman.
I just think they’re wrong. My thinking, like Dave’s about Christianity, comes from my parents. Check out dad’s most excellent sermon series on Revelation to see what I think about the millennium and the book of Revelation spelled out…
I think we get into trouble when we disregard the style a book is written in when we’re looking to it for meaning. That’s part of looking at context.
I got angry when I read this list of reasons Superman is better than Jesus because the guy took a verse (Luke 19:27) from a parable about a king out of context and applied it to Jesus.
Revelation 1 – “Witness Protection” – MP3
Revelation 2-3 – “To Him Who Overcomes” – MP3
Revelation 4-5 – “Who is Worthy?” – MP3
Revelation 6-7 – “When are we going to get there?” – MP3
Revelation 12 – “Defeating the Accuser” – MP3
Revelation 13-14 – “The Power – or the Passion?” – MP3
Revelation 15-16 – “Exodus Again” – MP3
Revelation 17-18 – “The End of the Scarlet Harlot” – MP3
Revelation 19 – “Onward Christian Soldiers?” – MP3
Revelation 20 – “Pit Stop” – MP3
Revelation 21-22 “Coming Home” – MP3
One of the things that Willows Pressy doesn’t do that MPC does really nicely is the sermon outline and pithy title. I like the structure a sermon outline provides for my listening – even if it’s just so I know how long the guy up the front will keep talking for – I assume listeners to my sermons feel the same way…
“Spiritual” Style
Someone has decided that someone at the Associated Press has decided that when Christians talk about the Holy Spirit’s guidance they actually mean something else.
That’s the only conclusion I can draw from this AP story about Catholics and celibacy.
Here’s the offending (or offensive) paragraph…
“Apparently seeking to squash any speculation that Rome had been courting the disaffected Anglicans, the Vatican said the “Holy Spirit” inspired Anglicans to “petition repeatedly and insistently to be received into full Catholic communion” individually and as a group.”
Actually, the “journalist” has gone a “little nuts” with the “quotation marks” as though every “noun”, “adjective” or “clause” that is a little “complex” needs “punctuating”…
Here’s the post that raised the conspiracy theory. I think it more likely that the journo was providing quotes from the document he cited in the first paragraph.
Where to eat
I’m not eating fast food this financial year. But if I was. And if I lived in America. Then this flow chart would be useful.
It can be easily adapted to our Australian milieu…
Ten famous blogs that make me laugh
Single themed blogs are so hot right now.
If you’re not aware of these already then maybe you should be…
- Passive Aggressive Notes
- There, I fixed it
- This is why you’re fat
- Failblog
- Surviving the World
- Stuff White People Like and the spin offs – Stuff Journalists Like, Stuff Christians Like, and Stuff Christian Culture Likes…
- Fancy Fast Food
- Insanewiches
- Super Useless Super Powers
- Larknews.com
I’m not sure that “Just Google It” will ever make it to that list…
Don Watson on Rudd Speak
There’s a great interview transcript on the ABC website featuring author and speechwriter Don Watson.
Here’s his plea to the PM…
I think he really ought to see it as one of his responsibilities to use the language as it’s meant to be used. I mean he does understand language very well, he knows when and how to use it well, which makes it all the less forgivable that he uses it so tiresomely so often.
Here’s his take on spin.
They just send us messages, and they call it spin, you know, which look if it was spin it would be fantastic, I wouldn’t mind it. Spin sort of suggests something mesmerising. This isn’t spin it’s anaesthetic. It’s like a big cloud of gas that comes over and makes cutting your toenails look interesting.
Spin gets a bit of a bad wrap. Everybody spins. Some people just declare it more than others. Here’s an example of how spin can be helpful, not dishonest.
Fact: Townsville is not widely known as a holiday destination.
Bad Spin: Nobody goes to Townsville for a holiday.
Good Spin: Townsville is an undiscovered and emerging holiday destination.
Both statements say essentially the same thing. One is more likely to get people to consider a holiday in Townsville.