Fallon and JT Do the History of Rap

I think that if two white guys attempted to mash up the history of rap, it would have to be done by guys like Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake. Oh, and with the ROOTS backing them up. I'm OK with this mainly because I think there was like one slip up in the whole thing and because of Jimmy Fallon's flawless 2Pac. Enjoy here or watch it at NBC.

Pledge to See a Great Movie and Help NY Charter Schools, Fools

I meant to mention this in my previous post regarding the movie, Waiting for Superman, but for some reason I forgot to include the information.

If you go to this website and pledge to see the movie (it takes two seconds), you'll support the charter schools of New York, which need more cash and better teachers.

Thanks for the reminder from my old high school classmate, Mera, who happens to teach 2nd graders in a New York Charter School.

Pledge! It's going to be a greeeeeaaaaaatt movie.

Where Do Good Ideas Come From?

There are a lot of great books coming out this fall, but I think I'm most personally excited for Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation.

Here's the book trailer for it. I'm not sure which I like more, the concept of the book or the concept of the trailer. While we're at it, how rad are these book trailers that are coming out lately? Me likey this trend.

You'll have to watch it on YouTube because my blog template is being sups lame. But come back for my comments, you guys! C'mon!

Yeah. That's what's up. The more research we come to, it's becoming increasingly clear that success, innovation, and advancement rarely come in isolation, but rather in community over a decent period of time.

My two loves - education and ministry - certainly need this truth implemented. The "Senior Pastor" model is done, the dictating principal/superintendent must be dethroned. More so, what Johnson points out is that we need to give more room for creative spaces (or places where new pieces of new ideas can come from) so that these hunches and small ideas can form. Why do you think Google rocks so much face? Something like 20% of your time is just for inventing and putting others' ideas together with yours.

What if ministries gave more time to pastors to roam their cities, meet people, and pray. Then they could come together to let the ideas collide for how to better minister to and seek the peace of their said city? Or what if teacher inservice days were totally rethought?

I like the idea of the Internet becoming what the coffee house was in the 18th century. It's funny to go to a coffee shop now and see everyone quietly tapping their laptops; same space, different way to communicate.

A Common Gap of Atheism, Part 3: Marilynne Robinson, the Truth and Tozer

My hero, the author Marilynne Robinson, wrote a great new book called Absence of Mind about a lot of this stuff. Christianity Today interviewed her last week and she said this in regards to the separations we make both as atheists and believers:

"[Atheists] have more or less accepted the notion that the more people know, the less inclined they will be toward belief - a central assumption of atheism. With this comes the idea that whatever is most toxic from religious point of view must therefore epitomize science. And all sorts of nonsense goes unchallenged. Christianity has abandoned its intellectual traditions, ceding that ground to anybody in a white coat. Where it has tried to muster courage, it has too often tended to become irrational and shrill. Meanwhile, a great age in true science, an absolute catalog of wonders, passes by unnoticed."

I’ll be the first to admit that Christians are horrific with their use of the word “true.” But it also must be noticed that the Atheists and physicists of our day make similar mistakes. When we categorize truth as only that which we may observe physically, we are in danger. Similarly, if we say that the Bible includes everything that is true and if it’s not in the Bible then it’s not true, we are in serious intellectual danger.

2 + 2 = 4 is not in the Bible and it is empirically true. Perhaps, then, there are things that are not physical that are only witnessed in the reality of our consciousness that are also deeply true.

Christians historically are people who desire truth. I am concerned with some of modern Evangelicalism because there is an irrational fear of science as if it might disprove God himself. What little faith we must have if we only see our God in the Scriptures and not in the entirety of his lovely creation. No, my God is living, active, speaking, moving.

If you are scared of science and physics and mathematics, then you have created for yourself a small god who isn’t even found in the Bible. My God made physics and lives and breathes in it, as he does in the very pages of his Holy Scriptures. When we discover a new scientific fact, we celebrate for now we know more about how God has invented his universe.

“For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things” (Romans 11:36).

A.W. Tozer’s theology was that “God’s Word” is not just the written word (the Bible), but “the breath of God filling the world with living potentiality.” In Tozer’s mind, the Word of God is bigger and more complex than a leather-bound Bible (although that is certainly a piece of it). To him, it is a universal and timeless Word of power and truth; so God has not only spoken, but he is currently speaking. Here’s a taste from The Pursuit of God:

“The Bible will never be a living book to us until we are convinced that God is articulate in his universe. To jump from a dead, impersonal world to a dogmatic Bible is too much for most people. They may admit that they should accept the Bible as the Word of God, and they may try to think of it as such, but they find it impossible to believe that the words there on the page are actually for them. A man may say, 'These words are addressed to me,' and yet in his heart not feel and know that they are. He is the victim of a divided psychology. He tries to think of God as mute everywhere else and vocal only in a book.”

Marilynne, would you like a last word?

“Christians should care for what is true in every sense of the word true. This emphatically includes good science – understanding always its necessarily hypothetical workings.”

Walk boldly into what is true and even what could be.

Some Days, Dilbert Speaks Great Truth

Dilbert.