Friday, April 28, 2006

Christianity, technology, and blogs

A couple interesting links ...

CNET News.com has a kind of lame article about how churches are spending zillions of dollars on multimedia. I say the article is lame because it just scratches the surface of how technology is an incredible launching pad/amplifier for the gospel. My own church recently set up an iTunes rss feed (aka podcast, or "Godcast") and we have clocked 6GB of sermon downloads in the first two weeks of this month. Our sister church in Thailand has a policy of distributing sermon CDs for free, and our pastor is receiving emails every day from Thai people who received the teaching from friends and say it has changed their lives. Anyway, the News.com story does have a cool title, "Is Jesus the next killer app?"

The second piece is from Wired.com's chief copy editor, who laments how blogs have encouraged the proliferation of slovenly writing. My blogland friend, Saurkraut, recently posted on blogger burnout and elicited a number of replies. It was interesting to read the reasons people gave for continuing to blog. Some blogged to exercise their writing chops while others did so for the community. As for myself, I have to admit that I write mainly for what I hope is the benefit of others. I think blogs are a great way to contribute to the social discourse. I blog for the same reason I decided to major in English: Ideas are powerful, but only when they are communicated well.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I also read that article on churches forming their own technological industry of sorts. Of course it was interesting, but I don't usually get too excited about it when so much emphasis is put on the material side of churches. I also would like to have seen CNet mention more about the goals behind the technology, but of course that isn't something CNet's going to do any time soon.

You can check out my blog at www.bitstomp.com. I just got started on this one, so there's not a whole lot there yet.