Postman: religious TV

...on television, religion, like everything else, is presented, quite simply and without apology, as an entertainment.  Everything that makes religion an historic, profound  and sacred human activity is stripped away;  there is no ritual, no dogma, no tradition, no theology, and above all no sense of spiritual transcendence.  On these shows the preacher is tops.  God comes out as second banana.

p119

Postman: discontinuity and contradiction

[young students are] coming from a different universe of discourse altogether:  the "Now...this" world of television.  The fundamental assumption of that world is not coherence but discontinuity.  And in a world of discontinuities, contradiction is useless as a test of truth or merit, because contradiction does not exist.

p112

Translation speed 125 years faster

Wycliffe Bible Translators expects to have the Bible — or at least some of it — written in all of the world's 6,909 spoken languages by 2025. About 2,200 languages remain without a Bible, which represents about 350 million people — mostly in India, China, sub-Saharan Africa and Papua New Guinea. Portable computers and satellites get the credit for speeding things up by about 125 years. Previously, a Wycliffe missionary family or team could spend decades learning and transcribing one language in a remote corner of the Earth. 

(Denver Post)

Postman: the problem with entertainment

The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining. which is another issue altogether. 

...televison is different because it encompasses all forms of discourse.  No one goes to a movie to find out about government policy or the latest scientific advances...But everyone goes to a television set for all these things and more, which is why televisioon resonates so powerfully through the culture. Television is our culture's principal mode of knowing about itself...

...For the message of television as metaphor is not only that all the world is a stage but that stage is located in Las Vegas...

p89, 94-95

Postman: technology metaphor

Each technology has an agenda of its own.  It is, as I have suggested, a metaphor waiting to unfold.

p87

Chambers: character

No man is born either naturally or supernaturally with character, he has to make character. Nor are we born with habits; we have to form habits on the basis of the new life God has put into us. We are not meant to be illuminated versions, but the common stuff of ordinary life exhibiting the marvel of the grace of God. Drudgery is the touchstone of character. The great hindrance in spiritual life is that we will look for big things to do. "Jesus took a towel…and began to wash the disciples' feet." 

Utmost 15th June

Chris Wright: the commission isn't a clock

The Great Commission is an expanding and self-replicating task, not a ticking clock for the end-times.

The Mission of God, p35

Ministry of the aged

"People at various stages of life give us a vision for our own life at that stage," says Friesen. After Friesen's own grandmother died, at age 99, he was particularly struck by the testimonies from older members.

"My grandmother's influence on me started when she was 89 and extended to 99," he says. "In the eyes of our culture, she's a useless person. But her most productive time in my life was her final ten years." This is something that everyone approaching or in retirement needs to hear, Friesen says. "You think nobody's paying attention" because of your age. "Think again. You can have a tremendous impact on people in your final decades. And you're going to have more of them than you think." A major job for the church, Friesen says, is to "give people a vision of the good life in the seasons of fall and winter."

Christianity Today.

#8 Drama

Well it had to happen sometime, much I am sure to Minty's depressed prediction, but this is a Yes album.

In my defence, it's not a 'normal' Yes album - it's not from the 'golden era' of side-long songs and completely incomprehensible Anderson lyrics.  In fact it had a ll gone a bit wrong by this time, with Anderson and Wakeman leaving, and Trevor Horn (soon to be Buggles) drafted in.  But neither is it the Yes-gone-pop of 90125 (though I like that one too).

It's somewhere between classic Yes and pop-yes.  For me, Machine Messiah is OK, but it's Does it Really Happen and especially Into the Lens which lift this to desert-island status, with Tempus Fugit finishing well.

Go on Minty, let yourself go........

Chambers: Homesick

You can never give another person that which you have found, but you can make him homesick for what you have.

10th June

Lewis: instinct to honour

Where men are forbidden to honour  a king they honour millionaires, athletes or film-stars instead;  even famous prostitutes or gangsters.  For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.

Equality, quoted Ward p68

Postman: the proper use of TV

Many television sets are also large and sturdy enough to bear the wieght of a small library.  The top of an old fashioned RCA console can handle as many as thirty books, and I know one woman  who has securely placed her entire collection of Dickens, Flaubert and Turgenev on the top of a 21" Westinghouse.  Here is still another use of television - as bookcase.

p85