Their latest annual report is there and their website is here.

The choice of “Art and Risk” as the theme of a weeklong seminar for Christian writers and artists this June proved sadly ironic when the host, Image journal, lost $65,000 through its online registration process.

Organizers of the Christian literary journal’s 2013 Glen Workshop hired Acteva, a company specializing in events for small nonprofit organizations, to handle its online registrations. The San Francisco-based company boasted a solid 12-year track record, and even gave Image a discount.

“We were looking to try to make it smooth and efficient,” said Gregory Wolfe, publisher and editor of Image. “We felt that it was a reasonable option for us because they were clearly keeping our needs in mind.”

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See what you make of it.

The Anglican Church of Southern Africa (ACSA) has launched a free cell phone application or ‘app’ to aid communication between parishes and parishioners in the Province.

The Dean of Christ Church Cathedral in the Polokwane area of South Africa, the Very Revd Luke Pretorius, is also a member of ACSA Media Committee.

“I am excited at what may be a world first from Africa,” he told ACNS, “and [also] for how this app will improve the communication between churches and people by using cell phone technology, an essential and already popular tool in Africa.”

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I began my sabbatical by taking three online courses through a Johns Hopkins University distance-learning program for high school students: honors pre-calculus, honors chemistry and a writing class. It was amazing to learn on my laptop at my own pace. For example, in the math class, I would watch a seven-minute video on how to solve equations using logarithms, then tackle a few problems. After typing in each answer, I immediately found out whether it was correct. If it was wrong, I could try again or read how to solve the problem. If I was totally stumped, I could call or e-mail the instructor to get a more thorough explanation.

Instead of sitting in a specific seat at a specific time, listening to the same long lecture as everyone else, I could tailor the classes to my strengths and weaknesses. I could move through some material quickly but take as much time as I needed to absorb the difficult stuff. Not only did these courses free up time to shoot a movie, but their structure helped me learn the material as well as I would have in a classroom. In four months, I covered a year of math.

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Details of the millions of people who risked persecution for refusing to join the Church of England have been made available online.

Beatings and thrashings were once commonplace for religious rebels and, by the 19th century, tens of thousands of people had been put to death by beheading, hanging or burning.

Archive records showing the full extent of non-conformist courage have been published in digital form to mark the 200th anniversary of the 1813 Doctrine of the Trinity Act, seen as the landmark acceptance of non-conformity.

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There is something indulgent about boredom. It makes me think of posh people in Russian plays complaining they have nothing to do while other people work their arses off in the field. As Schopenhauer insisted, life for the person of means becomes a question of how to dispose of surplus time. Maybe that’s why boredom feels like a problem especially associated with August and not least with children on long car journeys.

But according to the Norwegian philosopher Lars Svendsen, author of A Philosophy of Boredom, boredom comes to take on a particular and possibly darker inflection with modernity. Having been bored witless writing his PhD about Kant, Svendsen came to see a connection between his subject and his state of mind. With Kant, God is replaced by the self as the ultimate source of meaning. As traditional structures of meaning are wiped away, boredom comes to be regarded as a very personal sort of failing. And in order to avoid it, various distractions are entertained: travel, drink, drugs, the Xbox, sex, transgressive behaviour ”“ all strategies of avoidance, all hinting at a desperate desire to hold off the acknowledgment of meaninglessness. It is, says Svendsen, a problem characteristic of modernity. Whereas boredom has once bragged about as a mark of nobility, now it is the ultimate in personal failing. Those who are bored are losers.

Perhaps this is why the entertainment industry is more important to us that we are often prepared to admit.

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July marks the first time Yahoo has led the ComScore ranking since May 2011. Yahoo’s victory is all the sweeter given that its tally doesn’t count traffic from Tumblr, a popular blog site that Yahoo now owns.

Last year, Yahoo’s traffic numbers were headed downward, as was its stock price, before Ms. Mayer came on board in mid-July.

What accounts for the turnaround, and how meaningful is it?

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Even if we get to see more, why is the post to be regretted if it is only a record of fun at a party or a cuddle in a bedroom or an enticement? It could be healthy fun.

Society cannot tolerate youth having fun on their own terms and with their own ways of broadcasting their adventures. The purpose of the didactic videos is to kill junior sexual feelings with shame. How deplorable that sexually adventurous young women are being punished by society, and constantly being told that they are ”degrading themselves” and have no ”self-respect” by seeking out various sexual expressions.

At a point when girls need autonomy and self-respect, the Commonwealth government promotes shame. Instead of immunising girls against the consequences of viral posts, our educators promulgate fear, disgust and disgrace. We need a program to inoculate us against shame, not cripple us with fear.

Read it all from the SMH.

Since the days of Facebook’s Honesty Box, social-media websites have been the safe havens where teenagers go to gripe and gossip away from all the nosy adults in their lives. But times are changing: kids are spending more time carefully pruning their Facebook profiles in preparation for the college-admissions game, and they’re adopting a wider variety of social-media platforms to serve more specific functions. So maybe it’s not so far-fetched that LinkedIn, the stodgy social network for professionals, is suddenly making a very deliberate play to woo teenagers.

On Monday the social-networking site announced that it is lowering its minimum registration age from 18 to 14 in the U.S. and several other countries, opening the door for high schoolers to add LinkedIn to their already robust social-media diet of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr.

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Tyler Woolstenhulme might be loath to admit it but sometimes he’s not paying attention in church. He will happily confess that he’s not the only one.

The 31-year-old Mormon has more than once sat in the pew of his Sandy ward and let his mind wander. When that happens, he pulls out his iPhone 4 and sometimes plays his puzzle game, “1to50.” Or maybe he texts his friends across the aisle.

“I take the time in church to catch up with people I haven’t contacted in a while,” he said. “I text friends or family.”

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Beating the odds–a young man from California learning some tough lessons about life heading to a college education; a remarkable turn of events in the last week, as Nbc’s Miguel Almaguer reports.

Watch it all.

“Dude, I preached from an iPad the week the first iPad came out,” [Quigg] Lawrence said. “I wasn’t trying to be showy with it, but a lot of times my printer is down or I don’t have ink. So it’s just easier to put it on the iPad.”

Church of the Holy Spirit, the Anglican ministry in southwest Roanoke County where Lawrence preaches, is one of the only churches in the area with its own smartphone app designed to serve its members.

The app has been downloaded 880 times in the year it has been available ”” not bad considering the congregation consists of less than 1,500 members.

Read it all and the church website is there.

Mr. [Elmer] Griffin is among the roughly 20 percent of American adults who do not use the Internet at home, work and school, or by mobile device, a figure essentially unchanged since Barack Obama took office as president in 2009 and initiated a $7 billion effort to expand access, chiefly through grants to build wired and wireless systems in neglected areas of the country.

Administration officials and policy experts say they are increasingly concerned that a significant portion of the population, around 60 million people, is shut off from jobs, government services, health care and education, and that the social and economic effects of that gap are looming larger. Persistent digital inequality ”” caused by the inability to afford Internet service, disinterest or a lack of computer literacy ”” is also deepening racial and economic disparities in the United States, experts say.

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Check it out.

The title of this article may seem both presumptuous and audacious. Do I really believe every pastor should have a blog? Yes I do. I speak to pastors in numerous settings, and I am able to share with them the benefits of such a discipline in writing.

Understand that writing a blog can begin simple with little time pressure. The pastor can commit to write 400 words a week in one post. I do recommend that the number of posts increase to at least twice a week later, but you need to start somewhere.

I think you will be amazed how much the blog benefits the church and your ministry. Here are seven reasons why it is so important….

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High-profile pastors have long complained (along with other celebrities) of impersonators on social media. But Rick Warren recently revealed just how widespread the problem is.

Warren announced Tuesday that in the months since his son Matthew’s suicide, more than 200 fake Facebook pages have popped up, soliciting funds in Matthew’s memory. So far, he has succeeded in shutting down 179 of them, which he said were “making money on my son’s death.”

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The work of Richard Rothman, a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, is more fundamental: to save lives. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta predicts flu outbreaks, once it examines reports from hospitals. That takes weeks. In 2009, a study seemed to suggest researchers could predict outbreaks much faster by analyzing millions of Google searches.

Spikes in queries like “My kid is sick” signaled a flu outbreak before the CDC knew there would be one. That posed a new question for Dr. Rothman and his colleague Andrea Dugas:

Could Google help predict influenza outbreaks in time to allow hospitals like the one at Johns Hopkins to get ready?

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Public relations agencies now incorporate blogs into their overall marketing plans for clients; networks of bloggers help identify the most appropriate ones to recruit for those marketing efforts; and then bloggers, aware of the value they bring to the deal, consider how they want to be rewarded.

Five years ago, paying a blogger wasn’t something that came up often, said Caroline Friedman, senior associate at Burson-Marsteller. Now, she said, many more are responding to promotional inquiries with explanations of the rates that they charge for their time and access to their reader base.

“It’s a very noticeable shift every few months,” said Ms. Friedman, who works on various programs involving bloggers, including an ongoing project with Hormel Foods.

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The Federal Bureau of Investigation has discovered vulnerabilities in the government’s system for preventing market-moving economic reports from leaking to traders before public release.

Law-enforcement officials found “a number of operational vulnerabilities” involving “black boxes” used by several departments to control the release of sensitive economic data such as the monthly unemployment rate, according to a report by the inspector general at the Commerce Department.

The report said it was possible to subvert the system, which was designed to prevent media companies from sending economic data to traders early.

Read it all(or if necessary another link is there).

It’s finally happening, folks. This year, the average time Americans spend with digital media each day will surpass traditional TV viewing time. That’s according to of media consumption among adults.

The average adult will spend more than five hours per day online and on non-voice mobile activities (read: texting, apps, games). That’s compared to an average four hours and 31 minutes each day of TV watching.

Daily TV time will actually be down slightly this year, while digital media consumption will be up nearly 16 percent.

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A15-year-old boy confided in me after I addressed his class at a Sydney school last year. He cried as he told me that he had been using porn since the age of nine. He didn’t have a social life, had few friends, had never had a girlfriend. His life revolved around online porn. He wanted to stop, he said, but didn’t know how.

I have had similar conversations with other boys since then.

Girls also share their experiences. Of boys pressuring them to provide porn-inspired acts. Of being expected to put up with things they don’t enjoy. Of seeing sex in terms of performance. Girls as young as 12 show me the text messages they routinely receive requesting naked images.

Pornography is invading the lives of young people. Seventy per cent of boys and 53.5 per cent of girls have seen porn by age 12, 100 per cent of boys and 97 per cent of girls by age 16.

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“Mother of all rows”, the headlines trilled, but parenting website Babyology’s very public slapdown of overzealous trolls earlier this week sent out a clear message. Shut up or back off.

Here’s a recap: trolls targeted the site’s popular Facebook page with tirades of abuse, taking offence at anything and everything – from posts regarding children’s parties, to having siblings too close together, to being unable to breastfeed. (Where is the milk of human kindness when you really need it?)

The site’s moderators had long been used to filtering such vitriol. In the past their policy was to simply hide offensive posts from their 115,000+ followers and deny the “poster” a ready audience.

But everyone has their tipping point. That moment came for a Babyology staff member who was left “in tears” after being attacked over the way she had decorated her son’s nursery.

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Scott Thumma, a professor at the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, who studies large American churches, said YouVersion filled a longstanding vacuum for technological products aimed at a religious market. He called LifeChurch.tv “the most innovative congregation in the country in developing and using technology.”

The app has gained appreciation in the tech world as well.

“This is a remarkable tech start-up by any measure,” said Chi-Hua Chien, a partner at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins and a Christian who has offered informal advice to Mr. Gruenewald. He compared YouVersion with well-known ventures like Pinterest or Path.

Read it all from the front page of yesterday’s New York Times.

Recently I was visiting a church in the heart of a retirement community. The pastor got up and was astoundingly relevant. “There are five ways we tell you what’s going on here.” He held up his hand and counted on his fingers: “The bulletin, the sign, the website, our mailer and announcements.” He paused and then joked, “If you still don’t know what’s going on, then I have a hunch you’re just not with it!”

I don’t know if this was the pastor’s typical practice, but as a guest, it was a huge leg up in knowing where to find the information about how to get involved.

Your church may have stellar events, programs and even great communication strategies, but the best laid plans can get derailed by the simple lack of clearly and concisely communicating how you communicate.

– See more at: http://www.churchmarketingsucks.com/2013/06/communicate-how-you-communicate/#sthash.124jzRn3.dpufRead it all.

Not everyone is so keen to join in, which is why The Guardian has been offering readers the chance to switch off all coverage of royalty with a ”˜republican’ button. It’s an interesting foretaste of newspapers tailoring news and comment towards an individual’s own interests. Facebook and Google already use filter bubbles, so that news feeds ”˜edit out’ the updates of people whose links you’re less likely to click on, in my case those Leftie friends’ posts about 38 degrees. They become like just a vague whisper of Thought for the Day on a radio turned down: you can sort of tell by the sanctimonious tone that your mate is having a go at the Tories about something, but only vaguely.

Newspapers have always focused on news and comment that appeals to the readers’ prejudices, but online news services can target their customers a lot more accurately. Reading that our prejudices are correct gives us a little dopamine hit, so a site that delivers that service has an advantage. The internet offers news designed towards self-actualisation, just like any other form of consumerism, and this explains why people get increasingly angry at the BBC, which can’t do all those things; Republicans are furious at the Beeb’s tone only because they’re so used to hearing news that confirms their views rather than being exposed to others.

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…before pornography is a legal or cultural or moral issue, it is an ecclesial one. Judgment must, as Scripture tells us, begin with the household of God (1 Pet. 4:17). The man who is sitting upstairs viewing pornography while his wife chauffeurs their children to soccer practice might well be a religionless, secular culture warrior. But he is just as likely to be one of our church members, maybe even one who reads Touchstone magazine.

To begin to address this crisis, we call on the church of Jesus Christ to take seriously what is at stake here. Pornography is about more than biological impulses or cultural nihilism; it is about worship. The Christian Church, in all places and in all times and in all communions, has taught that we are not alone in the universe. One aspect of “mere Christianity” is that there are unseen spiritual beings afoot in the cosmos who seek to do us harm.

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Everyday Americans are not banging on the doors of Congress asking it to legalize online gambling. The country is already awash with casinos and state lotteries. Yet much of the gambling industry, a few gambling-dependent states like Nevada, and a handful of lawmakers seem eager to find any excuse to reverse a federal ban set down in 2006.

The latest example was a Senate hearing Wednesday. It was titled “The Expansion of Internet Gambling: Assessing Consumer Protection Concerns.” The hearing was cloaked to look at the alleged need for Washington to regulate Internet gambling ”“ even before it is legalized nationwide.

Lawmakers expressed concern over the few states that are moving to allow online wagers for only their residents. Such intrastate gambling was allowed by the Obama administration based on its 2011 re-interpretation of the 1961 Wire Act….

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…when he discovered credible evidence that the church’s founder, Joseph Smith, was a polygamist and that the Book of Mormon and other scriptures were rife with historical anomalies, Mr. Mattsson said he felt that the foundation on which he had built his life began to crumble.

Around the world and in the United States, where the faith was founded, the Mormon Church is grappling with a wave of doubt and disillusionment among members who encountered information on the Internet that sabotaged what they were taught about their faith, according to interviews with dozens of Mormons and those who study the church.

“I felt like I had an earthquake under my feet,” said Mr. Mattsson, now an emeritus area authority. “Everything I’d been taught, everything I’d been proud to preach about and witness about just crumbled under my feet. It was such a terrible psychological and nearly physical disturbance.”

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Why should pastors bother with social media?

Meredith Gould: Very short answer: Since social media, in some form is here to stay, church leadership, including but not limited to pastors, need to learn why it’s so powerful for ministry. I wrote The Social Media Gospel to help them learn and understand “why to” embrace social media. Why, pray tell, would any person of faith and goodwill choose to ignore these powerful tools for ministry?

You make the point that the rapid change of social media is one thing that church folks find off-putting. How can churches that don’t like change embrace such change-addicted platforms?

Meredith:….We need to distinguish among types of change before we can talk about what church people are finding so off-putting. Are they really upset about rapidly-changing functionality or is their resistance to cultural and institutional change?

Read it all.