No silly notion of playing the hero–what have creatures like us to do with heroism who are not yet barely honest?

~George MacDonald, A Silly Notion #135

• 
  George MacDonald
  Author: C. S. Lewis

Categories: Heroism, George MacDonald, Books
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How much do you make? have you ever contemplated suicide? Are you now or have you ever been…? Are you aware of the fact…? I have here before me… Electrical information devices for universal, tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community’s need to know. The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions–the patterns of mechanistic technologies–are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval, by the electrically computerized dossier bank–that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early “mistakes.” We have already reached a point where remedial control, born out of knowledge of media and their total effects on all of us, must be exerted. how shall the new environment be programmed now that we have become so involved with each other, now that all of us have become the unwitting work force for social change? What’s that buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzing?

~Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the MASSAGE

• 
  The Medium is the Massage
  Author: Quentin Fiore

Categories: Identity, Communication, Culture, Technology
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Innumerable confusions and a profound feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transformations. Our “Age of Anxiety” is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools–with yesterday’s concepts.

Youth instinctively understands the present environment–the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth. This is the reason for the great alienation between generations. Wars, revolutions, civil uprisings are interfaces within the new environments created by electronic informational media.

~Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the MASSAGE

• 
  The Medium is the Massage
  Author: Quentin Fiore

Categories: Media, Anxiety, Culture
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One of the strangest aspects of religious faith is how old ideas, truths, and lessons are continually reborn with new significance as life is experienced and reconsidered, the arts have a wonderful way of forcing us to pause and take time for this moment.

I am sure I had the ten commandments described to me succinctly when I was 5 years old or so in Sunday School. At that time I most likely was focused on the 5th commandment (4th if you are Catholic) “Honor your mother and father”. The presentation was probably accompanied by some exposition to the pointed application of not talking back to my parents and otherwise being a compliant child in order to fall in line with this positive directive from the overall collection.

Over the years I may have come across a good number of references to the ten commandments in order to enforce a particular point of morality, behavior, or theological inquiry. But more often than not, the ten commandments was not something that I regularly thought about or considered to be even a worthwhile structure for working through my faith… after all, didn’t Jesus get us beyond all those stodgy and definitive statements of the old Jewish religion?

In light of that general posture, I am willing to bet it would have been very difficult for me to even enumerate the ten commandments in the most simplistic list just a few weeks ago. Having recently attempted to do so with a small group of friends, we found ourselves at a questioning loss as to what the definitive collection of the ten commandments actually are. Different religious traditions create slightly different subsets based on the following breakdown, taken from Wikipedia… please forgive my violation of perhaps the 8th and 9th commandments.

This rediscovery of the ten commandments comes through the good fortune of my neighbor speaking very highly of a certain polish film maker who created what many consider to be the only television masterpiece of film work, The Dekalog.

Krzysztof Kieślowski is quickly becoming a distant mentor and example of handling great mysteries with exceptional honesty, respectful care, subjective content and still within the most daring and brave artistic expression.

Each one of these films has an amazing mixture of pointed story telling and still manages to reveal a huge area of honest discourse concerning the ambiguity of living with and without the observation of divine revelation. The timeless nature of the ten commandments reaches well beyond religious circles trying to figure out if the ten commandments are still relevant in a particular form of dogmatism. This is the power of film to weave reason, emotion, history, and story together into something that directs us to the transcendent and forces us to slow down, know ourselves, and perhaps see a glimpse of God’s intent towards and for us.

• The Dekalog on IMDB
• Krzysztof Kieslowski

Categories: Film, Faith, Art, Bible Study
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The worst images are of people who are overloaded with information, they don’t know what to do with it, and have no idea of what is important… they become information junkies.

~Neil Postman

• What is the problem that a technology seeks to solve?
• Who’s problem is it?
• What new problems does the technological solution create?

Neil Postman, our future problems…

Categories: Advice, Technology
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To say it, then, as plainly as I can, this book is an inquiry into and a lamentation about the most significant American cultural fact of the second half of the twentieth century: the decline of the Age of Typography and the ascendancy of the Age of Television. This change-over has dramatically and irreversibly shifted the content and the meaning of public discourse, since two media so vastly different cannot accommodate the same ideas. As the influence of print wanes, the content of politics, religion, education, and anything else that comprises public business must change and be recast in terms that are most suitable to television.

If all of this sounds suspiciously like Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism, the medium is the message, I will not disavow association (although it is fashionable to do so among respectable scholars who, were it not for McLuhan, would today be mute). I met McLuhan thirty years ago when I was a graduate student and he an unknown English professor. I believed then, as I believe now, that he spoke in the tradition of Orwell and Huxley–that is, as a prophesier, and I have remained steadfast to his teaching that the clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation. I might add that my interest in this point of view was first stirred by a prophet far more formidable than McLuhan, more ancient than Plato. In studying the Bible as a young man, I found intimations of the idea that forms of media favor particular kinds of content and therefore are capable of taking command of a culture. I refer specifically to the Decalogue, the Second Commandment of which prohibits the Israelites from making concrete images of anything.

“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, any likeness of any thing that is in heave above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water beneath the earth.”

I wondered then, as so many others have, as to why the God of these people would have included instructions on how they were to symbolize, or not symbolize, their experience. It is a strange injunction to include as part of an ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture. We may hazard a guess that a people who are being asked to embrace an abstract, universal deity would be rendered unfit to do so by the habit of drawing pictures or making statues or depicting their ideas in any concrete, iconographic forms. The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter a culture.

People like ourselves who are in the process of converting their culture from word-centered to image-centered might profit by reflecting on the Mosaic injunction. But even if I am wrong in these conjectures, it is, I believe, a wise and particularly relevant supposition that the media of communication available to a culture are a dominant influence on the formation of the culture’s intellectual and social preoccupations.

~Neil Postman; Amusing Ourselves to Death, The Medium Is the Metaphor

• 
  Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
  Author: Neil Postman

Categories: Communication, Media, Culture, Bible Study, Books
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I shuddered at the gaping hole in his neck; at the blood, and his grey, inert face. Who was he? No one seemed to know, or to care much either. All I wanted to do was to get away. Back to my dinner party, a drink, talk, spoons dipping into soup, servants in red cummerbunds passing round plates of food and bottles of wine–a scene calculated to put out of sight and mind this other one of sprawling bodies, and the man with the gashed throat who was too inconsequential even to have a name, or arouse curiosity as to why he should have cut a gaping hole in his windpipe; his single gesture of defiance against a world which seemed indifferent whether he lived or died.

At our dinner-table conversation I mentioned the incident, giving rise to a number of sage observations. Calcutta medical services very inadequate, traffic control deplorable anyway life held cheap in the East–look at the way they treat animals–in contradistinction to the West, where the individual was valued.

~Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time

• 
  Chronicles of Wasted Time
  Author: Malcolm Muggeridge

I read this passage recently while sitting alone in a local diner with the pulsating TV coverage of Haiti running incessantly on a mounted plasma screen. Subtitled imagery of earthquake horrors had accompanied my reading for several hours, and for a moment I had forgot that it was actually happening. Happening still, to people I had met. Frantz, Gertrude, Michalenge, and Mackenson. Are they still alive? I don’t know.

Just a few days earlier, I might have joined them at their dinner party.

Categories: Apathy, Malcolm Muggeridge, Books
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Online culture, he goes on, “is a culture of reaction without action” and rationalizations that “we were entering a transitional lull before a creative storm” are just that — rationalizations. “The sad truth,” he concludes, “is that we were not passing through a momentary lull before a storm. We had instead entered a persistent somnolence, and I have come to believe that we will only escape it when we kill the hive.”

~Jaron Lanier, from the NY Times

• 
  You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
  Author: Jaron Lanier

Categories: Technology, Books, Criticisms
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Some of you may have known that I visited PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti in August of last year. I was shocked last night to read the reports of the earth quake devastation in specifics that I am now personally acquainted with. I cannot begin to describe how devastating this natural disaster must be to a people already in so much need. The attached image shows the completely collapsed capital building, what must be a fitting metaphor for the now completely disheveled infrastructure of the already struggling 5th world country.

Attention, aid, and relief will surely be directed to Haiti in this moment. Please pray for the salvation of these people from this calamity and the chaos that is sure to follow. Thousands have died, years of work and investment has evaporated… it is a moment of hope disintegrating. Pray for all those committed to their work in Haiti to be sustained through this flash of suffering and the years of recovery that are sure to follow.

The following link is a news story and interview from Mallery Thurlow, I met her on my visit in August. She is a woman of incredible hope, faith, and dedicated charity… in her voice you can hear the full test of this moment for her and everyone like her who has weaved their hearts into the Haitian people, their history, and their land.

http://www.wnem.com/video/22223731/index.html

Fox News
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,582877,00.html

Show me more… »

Categories: Haiti, Prayer
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I number it among my blessings that my father had no car, while yet most of my friends had, and sometimes took me for a drive. This meant that all these distant objects could be visited just enough to clothe them with memories and not impossible desires, while yet they remained ordinarily as inaccessible as the Moon. The deadly power of rushing about wherever I pleased had not been given me. I measured distances by the standard of man, man walking on his two feet, not by the standard of the internal combustion engine. I had not been allowed to deflower the very idea of distance; in return I possessed “infinite riches” in what would have been to motorists “a little room.” The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it “annihilates space.” It does. It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given. It is a vile inflation which lowers the value of distance, so that a modern boy travels a hundred miles with less sense of liberation and pilgrimage and adventure than his grandfather got from traveling ten. Of course if a man hates space and wants it to be annihilated, that is another matter. Why not creep into his coffin at once? There is little enough space there.

~C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

• 
  Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
  Author: C.S. Lewis

Categories: C.S. Lewis, Technology, Travel, Books
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I am one of those fortunate people that is regularly sought out by the most persistent of benevolent mentors. The latest mentoring friendship that has been bestowed upon me comes in the form of a jovial Anglican technology entrepreneur with high hopes for the Detroit area.

Meet Father Richard Dalton, a local Anglican priest with his sights set on making a contribution to the lives of ordinary folks inside and out of the local church through faith, family, fellowship, and fun. Father Dalton found me a few years ago through of all places, the internet. My public blog tipped him off to a nerdy Christian Detroiter with a penchant reading appetite for the works of a fellow Anglican, Mr. C.S. Lewis. Before I knew it, I was swallowed up in the fellowship of this faithful servant of the greater Detroit area. His work and teaching is carried out in faithful footsteps through the Detroit area and the regular mirth of a warm smile, ready hug, and a sincere interest in whomever he is with. This honest joy of experiencing faith, family, fellowship & don’t ever forget fun is revealed along side the regular frustrations, difficulties, and struggles presented to any committed servant of family and community. And in that I am reminded of a quote by our mutually shared favorite author.

Joy, must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and Pleasure. Joy has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again…I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.

~C.S. Lewis

• www.fatherdalton.com
• www.lookupdetroit.com

Categories: Richard Dalton, Mentors, Fun, Detroit, Faith
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