Iraqis have passed their country's new constitution, according to official results from a referendum dismissed by the opposition but commended by the UN.I'm not sure if we can trust this result -- after all, Jimmy Carter and his election monitoring group were nowhere near the area...
Once you begin multitasking, a computer desktop very quickly becomes buried in detritus.
This is part of the reason that, when someone is interrupted, it takes 25 minutes to cycle back to the original task. Once their work becomes buried beneath a screenful of interruptions, office workers appear to literally forget what task they were originally pursuing. We do not like to think we are this flighty: we might expect that if we are, say, busily filling out some forms and are suddenly distracted by a phone call, we would quickly return to finish the job. But we don't. Researchers find that 40 percent of the time, workers wander off in a new direction when an interruption ends, distracted by the technological equivalent of shiny objects. The central danger of interruptions, Czerwinski realized, is not really the interruption at all. It is the havoc they wreak with our short-term memory: What the heck was I just doing?
God is God precisely in escaping and transcending comprehension by human beings. This can seem to mean that God is simply unknowable. If so, humans are better off not bothering about it. Atheism, agnosticism, or childish anthropomorphism -- all the same.
What Is The Emerging Church? (Introduction)Lately my days have been taken up with preparing a book and a course titled "Patron (and Matron) Saints" for Postmoderns (see my blog, deadchristianssociety.blog.com). The book, course, and blog feature the lives of Gregory the Great, Margery Kempe, John Comenius, John Newton, Charles Simeon, Amanda Berry Smith, Charles M. Sheldon, and Dorothy L. Sayers.Armstrong encourages Emergents to read biographies of "dead Christians" and there find inspiration for their conversation about how we do church.
So the question has haunted me: "Why should Christians today read biographies of 'dead Christians' from ages past?"
One particularly forceful answer has hit me from (what some evangelicals might consider) "left field"—the young movement of Emergent Christian thinkers and leaders...
Did you know that in California, child molesters and rapists are a protected class? It's true. Not only are California landlords banned from using the state's Megan's Law database to decline renting their properties to sex offenders, they're not even allowed to warn other tenants that these paroled criminals are now their neighbors. If they do the first, they can be fined $25,000 for housing discrimination. But if they don't do the second, they can be sued for failing to protect tenants against a known danger.
"If we have a cold winter, we are going to throw the switch, businesses will shut down, people will lose their jobs" - Sir Digby Jones, director-general of the Confederation of British Industry
The phenomenon of Starbucks is secular communion. Scones and coffee, after all, aren't so far removed from the ritualized consumption of grape juice and bread; they just taste better.
