Give four middle aged guys plastic guns with BB pellets, and you’ve got the Floyd gang.
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Category: Uncategorized (Page 3 of 22)
Laptop project enlivens Peruvian village – Giving- msnbc.com
Negroponte’s “One Laptop per Child” has begun spreading throughout Peru over the past six months. According to MSNBC, Peru purchased the largest number of laptops thus far by ordering 275,000. Apparantly, the ability to record is one of the most exciting features for children:
“What they work with most is the (built-in) camera. They love to record,” says Maria Antonieta Mendoza, an Education Ministry psychologist studying the Arahuay pilot to devise strategies for the big rollout when the new school year begins in March.
Already several competitors are trying to create a similar product. Intel is introducing the Classmate and several companies in India and Brazil are also trying to introduce laptops.
I find this whole project an exciting picture of how private enterprise, education, and government can work together in seeking for solutions to various challenges in our world. Kudos to Negroponte and his whole team!
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Tags: negroponte, laptop, classmate, peru, free market
I think once a week some preacher feels it is his solemn duty to warn his congregation not to read or even think about NT Wright.
Wright is an interesting thinker and figure in the church, he stirs both passionate admirers and fiery opposition. Those who oppose him feel it is their duty to warn everyone about the danger of his heretical ideas. I sometimes wonder if they might like to tape his mouth shut and ties his hands up, sort of the way Maximus the Confessor‘s enemies opposed him. (They cut out his tongue and chopped off his hand.)
I was happy to discover an irenic approach to the questions raised by NT Wright. Trevin Wax provided a chapter by chapter commentary on John Piper’s recent work, The Future of Justification. Wax models a pattern for listening while still taking stands that could be helpful in the world of theological discussion.
I think I just figured out why I got Leopard for my mac. You can preview multiple documents by simply tapping the spacebar. That’s right, simply highlight the documents you’re want to preview in the Finder and then tap space bar. Viola!
Thanks Lifehacker!
According to AP (via MSNBC) an Italian tourist was visiting Australia earlier this year, when he almost died from a ingesting a large quantity of ethylene glycol. But his life was saved through quick thinking doctors who promptly administered a vodka drip.
“The patient was drip-fed about three standard drinks an hour for three days in the intensive care unit,” he said. “The hospital’s administrators were also very understanding when we explained our reasons for buying a case of vodka.”
Since this treatment was so successful popular, I guess hospitals all across Australia will now happy hour treatments.
Lately, I’ve been using this blog to do some journaling. In the past, I tried to limit it to observations, but my mind doesn’t work in the pure blogging form. Sometimes I notice interesting things and trends online that I want to note, but other times I blab way to long for a typical blog. But it gives me somewhere to think out loud. Of course, I might just get tired and quit blogging again for 6 months. As Jeremy says, I am not a blogger but a grogger.
“Let us not love in word or speech, but in deed and in truth.” 1 John 3:18
Von Balthasar lays out a vision of Christian action based upon the revelation of Jesus and fully revealed in his self-emptying devotion on the cross. This action is rooted in a completely free communion of love between the Father, the Son and the Spirit.
Christian action outside this revelation of love becomes pure ethics and is drained of the relational content of love’s revelation. Without this relation, action can become subject to necessity because it is not free in love. Think of Jesus action in the cross. It proceeds from the love of the Father and returns to the love of the Father. His action is an incarnation of Lover and Beloved. Just as the Son lives in this pure relation of lover and beloved with the Father, He reveals this love to a world at enmity with God.
His incarnation reveals God’s intention to relate to His people as Lover and Beloved. Von Balthasar references the Song of Solomon to emphasize that Lover and Beloved are complete within their mutual reciprocation of love. This love is not dependent upon producing children but is free of necessity and complete in itself.
The love between the Father, the Son and the Spirit is a complete love that needs nothing outside the relation to bring completion. Creation does not make God’s love more real. God’s love does not necessitate creating. The love between the Father, the Son and the Spirit is complete (completely fulfilling and fulfilled).
There is no unmet longing within God. While human happiness necessitates a longing beyond ourselves, the love of God is free of necessity. This is difficult for us to grasp because we do not live in this reality. As result, without something new outside the circle of reciprocal love, we might tend to think this love, this relation will growing tiresome, boring. That reveals our own incapacity for complete love that is free of necessity.
With this idea of a completely fulfilled love within the relation of the Godhead, Von Balthasar continues to lay out a picture of love that has no motive, no unfulfilled eros, no longing beyond the mutual reciprocity of love. For images of this among humans, Von Balthasar turns to Mary when she pours out the costly vial on Jesus’s feet. Her act is pure response to love, thus it appears as useless to outside eyes. (This useless outpouring of love makes me think of Chuang Tzu’s useless tree.)
Christian action springs from the freedom of a loving communion between Lover and Beloved. Enveloped in the ongoing communion of lover and beloved, the Christian moves from love and toward love. Only now can Von Balthasar begin to discuss dogmatic theology and offer his definition that “Dogmatic theology is the articulation of the conditions of possibility of Christian action in light of revelation.”
Thus all Christian action is a secondary reaction to the primary action of God as Lover and Beloved. Taken up into this communion by the Holy Spirit, the Christian simply responds and acts in this self-emptying love as most fully revealed in the cross. In the cross, God reconciles his enemies. When the enemy is not even on speaking terms, God acts to bring reconciliation.
In Christ, He enters into the gulf of sin and suffering that ripples across our world. Entering into the very gulf of death created by such violations of love, God both both judges and offers complete rectitude by taking the division, the suffering, the separation into Himself. The cross is both historical (occurring at a fixed point in space and time) and ahistorical (anticipating the revelation of love’s ultimate triumph when all creation is reconciled to God).
Thus the Christian acts (incompletely and partially) in love at a fixed point in time and space while still anticipating the triumph of love in that action (complete and absolute). Von Balthasar calls this action parousial. The act of love that anticipates the sudden revealing of complete love in all creation.
The Christian also acts in faith. While not ignoring the faults of others in the world around him, the Christian is to look with eyes of faith at Jesus’ action in the cross. By the grace of the Spirit, the Christian is taken up into the communion of suffering found within the cross. Only in the place of the cross, does the Christian begin to behold the knowledge of the love of God. Thus loving action cannot be separated from a loving communion that is rooted in self-emptying love.
Von Balthasar offers many points for consideration and reflection: a love without necessity, loving action that is both universal and particular/historical and ahistorical, action rooted in the communion of self-emptying love, and a knowledge rooted in loving communion as revealed in the cross.
Oddly enough, after I posted the social computing diagram (that I picked up from Alex at the TechTarget blog), I thought of the Trinity–and the Holy Spirit in particular. The way the Internet has connected ideas (past, present, and even future) provides an analogy for thinking about who the Church Fathers called the “Fellowship of God.”
Many people pause and question the Christian doctrine of the Trinity (three persons, one God). It doesn’t make sense in a highly individualized world. And in fact, Enlightenment theologians rarely mentioned the Trinity (when compared with the writings of the Fathers).
Coming from the word pneuma, spirit means wind or breath. The wind moves over the surface of the connecting everything. We breathe to live. Breath in-spires or inspirits us. When I speak with another person we share words. The words are sounds carried by breath. Thus we share breath. Some have used the doctrine of the Holy Spirit to speak of a non monist, non dualism–challenging both East and West.
But that’s another story. Back to social computing. The amazing interconnectivity of the web reveals the amazing interconnectivity of humans across the planet (space) and across cultures (time). This provides an analogy for thinking about the Holy Spirit who is present to all particularities at the same time. (Accepting of course that the Triune God is beyond all referents while anticipating all referents.) He is not limited by particularity but can interact with particularity, which is difficult for us to process, so we ask, “How could God hear and answer all prayers at the same time.”
This might begin to help us think about questions like that. The Church Fathers thought about this and used the term perichoresis to discuss it.
I quit posting web 2.0 updates because the number of variations on the same theme quickly began to bore me. Sort like listening to a cliched fugue. But I find the NYT story on Google and IBM’s plans for cloud computing pretty exciting. This will allow some heavy duty data crunching that can better process and explore the unlimited information pools across the internet.
This is mostly magic to my little math-challenged brain, but the implications rock me Amadeus baby.
Just in time for the re-release of Poltergeist, the ghosts of Nuclear Power plants are making a comeback. Even some environmentalists are considering the possible advantages of nuclear power to address global warming issues. Of course, this excites me because maybe we’ll get to see another great skit like the Pepsi Syndrome.
