Category: Christianity

50 Apps for your Christmas iPad

Did you get an iPad for Christmas? I’ve had my iPad for a while now, and I’ve started to sort out the dross from the gold. Here are my favourites from a range of categories to get you going.

It really is a sensational device.

Reading Stuff

1. Reeder – best RSS reader, hands down.
2. GoodReader – great for PDF reading and annotating – terrific for essay writing.
3. Instapaper – curate your own longform articles from around the web to build your own magazine.
4. Zite – is an automated magazine service that finds articles based on your interests.
5. Flipboard – turns your social media channels (including google reader) into a magazine.
6. Kindle – Get Amazon’s range of e-books on your iPad.
7. Stumbleupon – click your way around interesting links in areas you’re interested in.
8. Google Currents – See what’s hot in Google.
9. Pinterest – another app for finding fun stuff on the interwebs. Populated mostly by crafty mums.

Photo Stuff

1. Instagram – I’d rather shoot photos with my iPhone camera, but the iPad app is great for checking out the social photostream (you can follow me, my username is nmcampbell, my feed is mainly photos of coffee and my daughter).
2. Phoster – makes cool posters.
3. Diptic – Stitch photos together in artistic ways.
4. Process – apply filters to your photos (not quite the same as Instagram) with the tap of a button.
5. Poly – Uses the power of maths to make polygon styled pictures. Kind of fun.
6. Photoshop Express – a nice lightweight photo editor from Adobe.
7. Grid Lens – is kind of fun, makes an instant diptic style collage (as in you take a bunch of shots at once, or with a slight delay. Clever.
8. Snapseed – I just bought this, and haven’t had a chance to play with it much yet.
9. ColorSplash – edit black and white photos with a splash of colour.

Social

1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. Path – a journal type thing where you can keep track of your movements, meals, and meetings, in a social way.
4. Beanhunter – find and review cafes everywhere.
5. Foursquare – let people know where you are and if you like it.
6. UrbanSpoon – find a restaurant and review it.
7. Stamped – review anything. Places. Books. Movies.

Utilities

1. Dropbox
2. Evernote
3. Bump – share files between iOS devices with a physical shake or “bump”…
4. Bluetooth Photo Share – great for giving gran some photos on her iPad.
5. Blogsy – nice multi-featured blogging software.
6. Google App
7. Remote – control your apple gear

Games

1. Angry Birds – But you already know this…
2. Stick Wars – Tower defence with stick figures.
3. Fruit Ninja – Slice and dice flying fruit.
4. Words with Friends
5. Scrabble – for the traditionalists
5. The Sims – I just downloaded this.
6. Wolfenstein 3D – A dose of nostalgia
7. NBA Jam – another dash of nostalgia. Great port from the SNES.

Music

1. Shazam – hear a new song, Shazam will tell you what it is.
2. Garageband – mix and mash your own music.
3. I am T-Pain – Autotune everything
4. Songify – speak music

Bible/College stuff

1. ESV
2. YouVersion – multiple translations at the tap of a finger
3. Logos – get your Logos library on the go
4. Vyrso – the book reader from Logos
5. Complete Class Organiser – Take notes, keep track of your timetable, and record lectures in one app
6. Greek Reader’s Lexicon – nice Greek app by Sam Freney
7. QuickCite – scan book barcodes get bibliography details by email.

That’s a bunch of apps – have I missed any?

December 26, 2011

Merry Christmas

What does Christmas have in common with a seven-headed dragon?

Ever wondered why the birth of baby Jesus so long ago is still a big deal? Here’s a nativity scene that doesn’t get preached on all that much in Christmas services, from Revelation chapter 12. It’s what’s going down in a figurative sense in the person of Jesus.

1 A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. 2 She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. 3 Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads. 4 Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born. 5 She gave birth to a son, a male child, who “will rule all the nations with an iron scepter.” And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. 6 The woman fled into the wilderness to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days.

7 Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. 8 But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. 9 The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.

10 Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say:

“Now have come the salvation and the power
and the kingdom of our God,
and the authority of his Messiah.
For the accuser of our brothers and sisters,
who accuses them before our God day and night,
has been hurled down.
11 They triumphed over him
by the blood of the Lamb
and by the word of their testimony;
they did not love their lives so much
as to shrink from death.
12 Therefore rejoice, you heavens
and you who dwell in them!
But woe to the earth and the sea,
because the devil has gone down to you!
He is filled with fury,
because he knows that his time is short.”

Jesus wins. Why this passage isn’t at the top of the Christmas pile is beyond me. I reckon a Christmas lights diorama of this passage installed at your church would win all sorts of prizes.

December 25, 2011

The Third Eagle responds to Colbert…

Again on the Denver airport mural…

December 18, 2011

Nine Christmas Videos to get you in the mood

Are you a Grinch? Snap out of it.

Calvin’s snowmen get a realistic 3D run…

Troy and Abed rap about infiltrating Christmas…

This is good when the kid starts singing… (just noticed that Findo posted this today too)

Some New Zealand kids tell the Christmas story…

A Christmas medley…

Canada is a small town. My Canadian friends from college are from pretty much the same place as this guy… it looks cold.

This whole street synchronised their Christmas lights.

Some dubstep Christmas lights…

Jimmy Kimmel’s funny Christmas parenting challenge (picking up where his Halloween challenge left off)…

December 18, 2011

Holy posthumous hagiography Batman: Reflections on the “Christian” response to the death of Christopher Hitchens

Seriously internet. Get a grip.

Christopher Hitchens died today. He was a brilliant and acerbic polemicist who played pretty free and easy with exactly what historically orthodox, Bible based Christianity looks like in his most popular work God Is Not Good, but he was by all accounts a charming, debonair, raconteur type who meant what he said, and said what he thought, in a manner that belied his significant gifts. By all accounts, including his own, his battle with cancer was difficult, but he conducted himself with the poise, gravitas, and wit that endeared him to readers around the world.

But he was committed to remaining an atheist to the end. Committed to maintaining his rage against God (incidentally the title of the book his brother Peter wrote when explaining why he returned to faith). Now, Hitchens had plenty of Christian influence in his life – his brother, his travelling debate compadre Douglas Wilson, and Francis Collins, the head of the human genome project, and founder of Biologos, who took a personal interest in his treatment for the nasty cancer which ended his life too soon. Hitchens also clearly understood the gospel he was rejecting – his pointed criticisms of Christian liberalism make it clear that he knew what the Christian faith entailed. And that he rejected it deliberately, defiantly, and with some style and wit.

Here’s his definition of Christianity:

“I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.”

He was in enough debates with enough Christians that he had a fair idea of what it was he was arguing against (even if he chose to misrepresent it for the sake of some polemical point scoring).

So why. Pray tell. Are we Christians so committed to articulating a hope that Hitchens magically renounced his skepticism at the very last? Certainly it is our hope. But should we not take the man at his word. His last words, incidentally, took the form of a requiem for the atheist dream, throwing down the gauntlet to challenge Nietzsche, one of the grandfathers of the modern atheist movement, and particularly his somewhat facile maxim that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Hitchens was wrong to dismiss that saying – because the cancer killed him in the end. And the only thing that doesn’t kill a human, at least in the Biblical account of humanity, is faith in Christ, by which we have a much more hopeful outlook than either Hitchens or Nietzshe…

“Before I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a year and a half ago, I rather jauntily told the readers of my memoirs that when faced with extinction I wanted to be fully conscious and awake, in order to “do” death in the active and not the passive sense. And I do, still, try to nurture that little flame of curiosity and defiance: willing to play out the string to the end and wishing to be spared nothing that properly belongs to a life span. However, one thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings. And there’s one that I find I am not saying with quite the same conviction as I once used to: In particular, I have slightly stopped issuing the announcement that “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”

The Christian attempt to respond to the death of an interlocutor by extending grace to them, and naming them as potentially one of the saints, is nobly intended, but was odd when Steve Jobs died. And is downright insane when it comes to Hitchens. I’m not saying God couldn’t have come knocking on Hitchens’ door, but there is simply no indication that he changed his mind at the last (and he precluded such with a particularly pointed statement just months ago). Despite what Doug Wilson’s much lauded eulogy on Christianity Today might suggest. So while I hope Hitchens found the peace that faith in the resurrection of the Lord Jesus brings – I’m not going to chuck him a halo and a white robe just in case. But I’m not sure why the Christian blogosphere embraces the hagiographic eulogy in these times. The most gracious way to let an atheist go out is to let them go out acknowledging that they were defiant to the end (Matt Stone says something similar but with more brevity), that they, unlike many others – considered the questions of eternity, and their own mortality, and in the words of Hitchens, looked death in the face bravely (but stupidly), these were his last published words.

“So far, I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me, and to stay combative even while taking the measure of my inevitable decline. I repeat, this is no more than what a healthy person has to do in slower motion. It is our common fate. In either case, though, one can dispense with facile maxims that don’t live up to their apparent billing.”

December 16, 2011

SandBible.com does Christmas

Some very talented friends of mine are working through the gospel stories. In sand. I posted the Easter one last Easter. This Christmas one is equally sensational – and a really accessible and engaging presentation of the good news of Christmas.

We used it at our Carols night at Scots on Sunday and it worked. Get the full versions for a small price (it takes days of work to put these together) from sandbible.com.

December 13, 2011

Forging disciples and Japanese sword making

Sword making fascinates me. Proper sword making. Not those novelty blades you buy at cheap markets and in trinket shops. It’s so tactile. There’s something romantic about a forge and the hammering of red hot metal. But its archaic at the same time. And pointless (pun intended). Nobody runs around with swords any more. Except ninjas.

Korehira Watanabe makes Japanese swords. He’s trying to recreate a legendary blade by feel, without instructions.

Handmade Portraits: The Sword Maker from Etsy on Vimeo.

From the Etsy Blog:

Korehira Watanabe is one of the last remaining Japanese swordsmiths. He has spent 40 years honing his craft in an attempt to recreate Koto, a type of sword that dates back to the Heian and Kamakura periods (794-1333 AD). No documents remain to provide context for Watanabe’s quest, but he believes he has come close to creating a replica of this mythical samurai sword.

He’s motivated by handing down a tradition. And he says this cool thing about his disciple.

“I want my disciple to surpass me as a swordmaker. It is my duty to build up a disciple who is better than me. Otherwise the tradition will wear thin with time.”

That’s a nice difference between being in business for yourself, and being in business because you love what you do, or because you feel vocationally called to preserve a tradition or truth.

Here’s a previous post about a Taiwanese swordsmith.

December 11, 2011

When the juxtaposition of “Schoolies” and “viral” is a good thing…

So. Schoolies week, for international readers and old people (lets face it – both of you are a minority in terms of the readership here) is a week where young school leavers traditionally do stupid stuff with alcohol. Scripture Union do a pretty awesome job of running camps for people who want to remember the week. I went. Back when I was a schoolie. Some people reading this were on the camp with me.

Anyways. This year SU Schoolies has gone viral with one of their nightly entertainment products (they have a variety show each night) – a parody of Party Rock Anthem – getting abundant media coverage (see Sunrise and ACA) and over 200,000 hits so far.

It’s a bit bizarre – my Facebook feed is filled with it. Which is to be expected given several of my Facebook friends were involved with the camp, are involved with SU, or made the video… but equally bizarre is that former colleagues and people I know who work in local government are posting it too. That’s the anatomy of a viral success.

So congrats to SU and the guys behind the video. They are, I think, the most famous YouTubers I know.

December 9, 2011

Those Mormon ads, and how to kill a high profile media campaign…

I just saw the first Mormon ad to feature high profile league player, and grand final winner with the mighty Manly Warringah Sea Eagles, Will Hopoate. Sharp. They’re a great ad for Manly. And, like all the ads in this campaign, are visually appealing and tightly produced.

There was a higher profile League star than Hopoate – Dizzy Izzy Folau. Israel has been out of the spotlight in the last year because he made a big money switch to AFL. To a team that doesn’t exist yet.

Luckily the Mormons didn’t feature Israel in their ads. Because he recently turned his back on the cult, publicly, during this campaign.

And here’s what he had to say… and that, friends, is how to harpoon a campaign.

“I had a personal experience with the holy spirit touching my heart,” Folau told AAP.

“I’ve never felt that before while I was involved in the Mormon church – until I came to the AOG church and accepted Christ.

“It’s been an amazing experience for me personally and I know a lot of people on the outside have been saying stuff about why we left.

“And some people (are) assuming that we left because of money, and all that sort of stuff.

“I know for myself that it wasn’t.

“But I guess at the moment, the people on the outside don’t really know the main reason why we left.”

The 22-year-old instigated the change himself after researching the history of Mormonism, and said the move was easy to make.

Folau’s friends have been understanding and supportive for the most part, but he admits it has been hard on a few of them.

God will play a large role in Folau’s life as he attempts to secure a berth in the Giants’ side for their season opener against Sydney.

December 4, 2011

Why your Youth Group needs to work on loving one another…

This is such a bizarre Christian propaganda movie…

December 1, 2011

A Cheery Christmas message from the Third Eagle

The lyrics and the backdrop present a little bit of a dissonant message.

November 29, 2011

Dear Christian, you need “game”…

Doug Giles wrote the book on raising tough daughters. No. Literally.

He seems to be confusing getting “game” with shooting and mounting animals on your wall… at least that’s the visual aid in this video on being a ballsy man of God. Where he says we need “cajones” to proclaim the gospel, or our nation is screwed. And by our nation he means his nation.

At least he doesn’t equate masculinity with cage fighting.

November 21, 2011

Deliberately vague prophecy: The world will end “as we know it” in 2012

Things will shift. Things will change. There’ll be elections and an economy and stuff. Truth and error will collide. Unlike last year… or the year before that… or the year that REM wrote their song…

These videos from prophetess Patrcia King seem pretty much to be an exposition (rip off?) of REM’s lyrics…

” it starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes, an aeroplane…world serves its own needs, dummy serve your own needs… a government for hire and a combat site. Left of west and coming in a hurry with the furies breathing down your neck… Uh oh, overflow, population, common food, but it’ll do…Save yourself, serve yourself. World serves its own needs, listen to your heart bleed dummy with the rapture and the revered and the right – right. You vitriolic, patriotic, slam, fight, bright light, feeling pretty psyched.”

Yeah. So. Things are going to change next year. I can feel it… It will certainly be a different year to this year.

November 18, 2011

Fork Criticism: Understanding Biblical scholarship through cutlery…

If you feel like you should be on the cutting edge of Biblical scholarship, or if you just want to get the point… here’s a visual guide to various scholarly approaches to the Bible, applied to cutlery. For your edification and education…

We begin with what we have. A fork. It is a very clever implement. Great for stabbing food and carrying it to one’s mouth. It has the perfect number of prongs; one less and small food would escape, one more and the fork would be ungainly.

The foundational assumption in higher criticism is that this fork is a development of history. It is unlikely, given its perfect suitability for the job, that there were not previous, primitive versions.

These versions may have been the result of a series of communities, each with inadequate eating utensils (form criticism)…

There may also have been a “genuine” original tradition, that others have built on, adapting the fork to their own communities and types of food – if you don’t just eat a big hunk of meat, then you need multiple prongs… There might be different metals involved in the handle and the prongs… there might be a brand name stamped on the fork… there are myriad avenues for speculating about the various forms that have combined in this one utensil.

Or they may have been the result of somebody sitting down with various eating utensils and combining them (source criticism).

Source criticism is also pretty useful when you’re dealing with a complex and evolved version of a fork – when we already have a version of the fork to compare things to… We can conduct “Spork Criticism”…

Or, for the more highly evolved, Splade Criticism…

Things start to get a little bit more complicated as the cutlery gets more complicated…

Maybe the final form it the result of somebody bringing a bunch of different utensils together.

Or maybe it represents one tradition’s approach to cutlery and efficient design.

One of the interesting things about this level of complexity is that sometimes sources and forms collide… sometimes what one group saw as a “tradition” actually turns out to be from two different sources.

Either way… what we have is a final form fork. And we can speculate about its compositional history.

Sometimes this allows us to study the previous types of fork, and draw conclusions about the people involved, and their diets. Sometimes we can see the seams where new prongs were welded on. This excites some people more than others. This process – either in source or form criticism – is called Redaction Criticism…

If you do redaction criticism with the final form of the fork you can understand the community who put it all together… This is close to the traditional view of fork scholarship, one might call it a Canonical approach.

Some people are just born skeptical – they have doubts about the fork, our hands are natural, the products of science and stuff, so we should eat with them. Fork users are gullible, and if there is a fork, it’s probably a symbol of the hand anyway, used by powerful people to control the eating habits of the masses. This is “Radical Criticism”…

Sometimes it just makes more sense to see the fork for what it is – a cleverly designed implement that serves a purpose. All this studying of forks sometimes gets in the way of just using the fork for what it is made for. Eating. This is the “traditional” view.

November 18, 2011

Preaching Idol: How not to fill the vacancy on your mega church preaching roster…

Curiouser, and curiouser. Things are going further down the rabbit hole at Mars Hill. Mark Driscoll is having a holiday, and to figure out who will preach when he’s not, Mars Hill is holding “Q” School. Because it would be horrible to have each campus have a different preacher… you know… somebody there in the flesh.


Via Mars Hill’s Flickr

“Tuesday, November 15th from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m., we’ll be hosting our first ever Preaching Qualifying School (Q School) at Mars Hill Ballard. This event will be a pressure-cooker preaching competition a la American Idol between 3 Mars Hill elders with the prize of being part of our preaching rotation to fill the pulpit on weeks Pastor Mark is out of the pulpit. “

Via the Facebook Event Page…

It might be a joke, but if it’s a joke, it’s bad. It’s like the Pressy Church’s trials for license, but put on show, for everybody to watch, and it’s a meritocracy. They’re judging preachers by who the “best” is, and 1 Corinthians 1 says no.

10I appeal to you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another so that there may be no divisions among you and that you may be perfectly united in mind and thought. 11My brothers, some from Chloe’s household have informed me that there are quarrels among you. 12What I mean is this: One of you says, “I follow Paul”; another, “I follow Apollos”; another, “I follow Cephasa”; still another, “I follow Christ.”… 17For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel—not with words of human wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.

It seems to me that filling that sort of gap in the preaching schedule should be done behind closed doors, and shouldn’t be done by pitting brothers in Christ against one another, whatever the “spirit” of the event is… turning it into some bad rip off of a reality TV show cheapens the pulpit, and cheapens the ministry of the losers.

Here’s some more on the day, from Driscoll’s blog… which contains some gems on preaching, and highlights just how bizarre Driscoll’s ministry is becoming – in many ways he’s a great model for how to engage with culture and point people to Jesus. But…

“Only three men will preach this round, but there will be other rounds forthcoming. This round’s contestants will be Pastor Thomas Hurst of Mars Hill Bellevue, Pastor Scott Mitchell of Mars Hill Everett, and Pastor AJ Hamilton of Mars Hill Albuquerque. They will have 30 minutes each with a shot clock and buzzer. They can bring only a Bible with them on stage.

This will be fun…for some of us. For our Mars Hill version of American Idol for preachers, I’ll play the part of Simon Cowell, minus the deep v-neck and British accent. Joining me on the judging panel will be Dr. Justin Holcomb who runs Resurgence, Pastor Scott Thomas who runs Acts 29, and Pastor Dave Bruskas, the executive elder who oversees all our churches. “

So you can only preach from a Bible? That’s guaranteed to produce some pretty tightly thought out oratory.

Some of Driscoll imposing himself on the process (the other 14 tips are pretty good), these ones are mostly good…

“Look like someone who has it together from clothes to haircut to overall presentation. You don’t need to be a model, but you should look presentable. If you have bed-head, your fly open, keep losing your place in your notes, your shoe is untied, your mic battery dies, and you say, “Um,” a lot because you’re unprepared, I may feel sorry for you but I’m not following you because you don’t seem to have a clue where you are going.”

I understand where he’s going with that one – our presentation shouldn’t be a stumbling block… but untied shoes? Seriously?

And of course, Driscoll’s Discern-o-meter will be the difference between a pass and a fail… he’s looking for preachers who have the X Factor. Who have “it”…

“It” is the presence and power of the Holy Spirit in you and through you. I’m looking to see if you have it. I can’t explain it, but I know it when I see it.”

How about “it” just be what was “it” for Paul…

20Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. 22Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, 23but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength…

1When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God.a 2For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. 3I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling. 4My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, 5so that your faith might not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power.

November 13, 2011