Got your summer reading list planned? If you’re looking for some interesting book suggestions, and/or some opportunities to discuss what you’re reading with others, check out Breakpoint’s summer “Blog a Book” challenge.

Blog-a-Book: Summer reading challenge

Book Perhaps you heard Chuck Colson talking today about BreakPoint’s new summer reading list. Here’s the commentary, in case you didn’t — and here’s the list, compiled of all those book suggestions we tossed around the last few weeks.

And here’s a challenge for those of you who love to read:

Next week a group of us bloggers, along with two guest bloggers from our internship program, are starting “Blog-a-Book.” It’s an idea we got from Slate’s “Blog the Bible” feature, although our vision is just a bit less ambitious. Each of us has selected a book from the new reading list and, for nine weeks (starting July 9), will be reading it and writing about it here on the blog.

We’d like to challenge you to join us. If you’re game, choose a book from the list and blog along with us! You can use the comment section on any of our Blog-a-Book posts to log your thoughts and impressions on what you’re reading.

The full blog entry is here.

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Personally, this elf would love to see some “book blogging” on T19 this summer, or perhaps Stand Firm? Sarah Hey set an example recently with her marvellous post on Bleak House. And yes, that post got this elf re-reading Bleak House! I’m currently on chapter 36…! 😉

Ripon, England, (PRWEB) July 5, 2007 — Holy Trinity Church Ripon has launched an online ‘church’ for people who are not already engaged with the Christian faith, and who are looking for answers, but may not feel ready (or be able) to walk into a church building. Its goal is to help people discover if God is of relevance to them today, providing a safe and self-directed way to find straightforward answers to questions about Christianity. Longer-term, the goal is to encourage them to find a local church where they can feel at home.

Very few churches exist purely online, and Church on the Net (www.church-on-the-net.com) is unique because it is evangelistic, rather than designed to serve believers or any pre-existing fellowship. The team behind the project says that as well as agnostics, atheists and seekers, however, the online church may be useful to new Christians afraid of asking ‘silly’ questions, Christians who have slipped away from an active faith, and those who find it difficult to meet together (such as the housebound, carers, and those in remote areas or who face persecution).

“As odd as it may seem to Christians, who have all the advantages of fellowship through belonging to a traditional church, there are huge numbers of people who are accustomed to being part of online communities, whose ‘friends’ they may never meet face-to-face,” says Mark Tanner, vicar of Holy Trinity Ripon. “The idea of doing things online feels safe and attractive to them, so why not introduce church into that lifestyle?”

Church on the Net is divided into three sections:

· a reference section, with 85 articles offering explanations or perspectives on many issues relating to God, church and Christianity, including common and difficult questions

· a weekly article, updated every Sunday, exploring the Christian faith and how it is lived out on a daily basis. The launch address has been provided by the Rt Revd John Packer, Bishop of Ripon & Leeds

· an interactive community area, where visitors can engage with the site and one another through forums and blogs.

The full article is here.

When news broke on May 8 about the arrest of a half-dozen young Muslim men for supposedly planning to attack Fort Dix, alongside the usual range of reactions ”” disbelief, paranoia, outrage, indifference, prurience ”” a newer one was added: the desire to consecrate the event’s significance by creating a Wikipedia page about it. The first one to the punch was a longtime Wikipedia contributor known as CltFn, who at about 7 that morning created what’s called a stub ”” little more than a placeholder, often just one sentence in length, which other contributors may then build upon ”” under the heading “Fort Dix Terror Plot.” A while later, another Wikipedia user named Gracenotes took an interest as well. Over the next several hours, in constant cyberconversation with an ever-growing pack of other self-appointed editors, Gracenotes ”” whose real name is Matthew Gruen ”” expanded and corrected this stub 59 times, ultimately shaping it into a respectable, balanced and even footnoted 50-line account of that day’s major development in the war on terror. By the time he was done, “2007 Fort Dix Attack Plot” was featured on Wikipedia’s front page. Finally, around midnight, Gruen left a note on the site saying, “Off to bed,” and the next morning he went back to his junior year of high school.

Wikipedia, as nearly everyone knows by now, is a six-year-old global online encyclopedia in 250 languages that can be added to or edited by anyone. (“Wiki,” a programming term long in use both as noun and adjective, derives from the Hawaiian word meaning “quick.”) Wikipedia’s goal is to make the sum of human knowledge available to everyone on the planet at no cost. Depending on your lights, it is either one of the noblest experiments of the Internet age or a nightmare embodiment of relativism and the withering of intellectual standards.

Love it or hate it, though, its success is past denying ”” 6.8 million registered users worldwide, at last count, and 1.8 million separate articles in the English-language Wikipedia alone ”” and that success has borne an interesting side effect. Just as the Internet has accelerated most incarnations of what we mean by the word “information,” so it has sped up what we mean when we employ the very term “encyclopedia.” For centuries, an encyclopedia was synonymous with a fixed, archival idea about the retrievability of information from the past. But Wikipedia’s notion of the past has enlarged to include things that haven’t even stopped happening yet. Increasingly, it has become a go-to source not just for reference material but for real-time breaking news ”” to the point where, following the mass murder at Virginia Tech, one newspaper in Virginia praised Wikipedia as a crucial source of detailed information.

Read it all.

Read it all from Sunday’s New York Times.

Read it all from the Sunday Times.

From the NY Times:

Caitlin Todd enjoys making friends on social networking Web sites, but is turned off by content that she believes is inappropriate on a number of popular pages.

So Caitlin, 16, meets people only on Christian social sites like www.hisholyspace.com and www.xianz.com, where profanity is prohibited, prayer is urged and content is strictly monitored.

“I use Xianz because it is a place that I can come to and have fellowship with friends. Sharing God’s word and helping others,” Caitlin wrote in an e-mail message. “Xianz is like a big church!”

Read it all.

Many of us in the Anglican blogosphere have been saddened this week to learn that our friend and one-time fellow Anglican blogger (now a Roman Catholic) Fr. Al Kimel is giving up blogging for personal reasons. Pontifications has been one of the best theological blogs on the web, applauded by Catholics, Anglicans, Orthodox, with a very large and loyal readership.

It was near the top of the non-Anglican links list we’ve compiled, but haven’t yet had a chance to format and post on our side-bar here.

We first read the news on Orthodox priest Fr. Stephen Freeman’s blog, Glory to God for All Things, which Fr. Al introduced many of us to. Todd Granger, Brad Drell and Sarah Hey of Stand Firm all picked up the news and added their comments.

Just this morning, I read Ralph Webb’s comments on his blog, Anglican Action.

Namarie indeed, Father Kimel. But as you say goodbye, do know that your faithful service to our Lord and your work to renew the Episcopal Church has not been in vain. You have inspired people who you do not know and who have never met you to stay faithful to our Lord and Savior. We remember your work on the Baltimore Declaration. In your departure from TEC, our loss was Rome’s gain. We thank you for providing us with, for a few years, one of the most spiritually sound, astute, and challenging blogs out there. And if our Lord ever leads you to take up blogging again, many of us will be grateful.

May our Lord grant the healing that you need, for “the hands of a healer are the hands of a king” (Tolkien again, rough paraphrase from memory).

This elf says “Amen!” to all of what my fellow bloggers have written so eloquently, and adds my profound thanks to Fr. Al for Pontifications and all he contributed to TitusOneNine as well in many comment threads. And it is worth noting that Fr. Al’s essay “The Grand Question” holds the records for most comments ever on TitusOneNine, with a staggering 561 comments!

May the Lord bless you and your family Fr. Al and grant you His peace.

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Note: at least for the moment, it seems impossible to access the original post of “the Grand Question” which Kendall excerpted and linked on Titusonenine, is not accessible online. Fortunately, Fr. Al seems to have preserved that entry on his page of entries on the theme of Justification on his new blog:

Look for entry # XXXIV which begins:

>XXXIV

The justification of sinners””this is “the grand question,” declared Richard Hooker, “which hangeth yet in controversy between us and the Church of Rome.” Hooker notes that Anglicans and Catholics agree on many points about justification. They agree that all human beings are sinners and need to be reconciled to God. They agree that God alone is the efficient cause of justification: the justification of sinners is the work of the Holy Trinity. They agree that no one attains justification but by the merits of Christ Jesus: we are justified by grace alone for the sake of Christ, on the basis of his saving death on the cross.

…[The] Internet, ever a relentlessly democratizing force, now brings the pseudo-confession as public manipulation into every home in America. Christianity teaches that we are born in sin and struggle with it throughout our lives. The age of the Internet has added a new Warholian twist on this idea, and not for the better. We’re all still sinners but only for fifteen minutes at a time, and relegated to the message board of our choosing.

—Mollie Ziegler Hemingway

From the New York Times:

Has online retailing entered the Dot Calm era?

Since the inception of the Web, online commerce has enjoyed hypergrowth, with annual sales increasing more than 25 percent over all, and far more rapidly in many categories. But in the last year, growth has slowed sharply in major sectors like books, tickets and office supplies.

Growth in online sales has also dropped dramatically in diverse categories like health and beauty products, computer peripherals and pet supplies. Analysts say it is a turning point and growth will continue to slow through the decade.

The reaction to the trend is apparent at Dell, which many had regarded as having mastered the science of selling computers online, but is now putting its PCs in Wal-Mart stores. Expedia has almost tripled the number of travel ticketing kiosks it puts in hotel lobbies and other places that attract tourists.

The slowdown is the result of several forces. Sales on the Internet are expected to reach $116 billion this year, or 5 percent of all retail sales, making it harder to maintain the same high growth rates. At the same time, consumers seem to be experiencing Internet fatigue and are changing their buying habits.

John Johnson, 53, who sells medical products to drug stores and lives in San Francisco, finds that retailers have livened up their stores to be more alluring.

Read it all.

Update: Don Surber has more here.

Almost 300 million people worldwide are now accessing the internet using fast broadband connections, fuelling the growth of social networking services such as MySpace and generating thousands of hours of video through websites such as YouTube.

There are more than 1.1 billion of the world’s estimated 6.6 billion people online and almost a third of them are now accessing the internet on high-speed lines. According to the internet consultancy Point Topic, 298 million people had broadband at the end of March and that is already estimated to have shot over 300 million. The statistics, however, paint a picture of a divided digital world.

Read the whole article.

Local ministers are working to find new ways to spread their message not only within their local community, but the global community provided by the World Wide Web.

“We have to take the words and put it out for as many people as possible,” Chip Lee, minister at St. John’s and St. Matthew’s Episcopal churches in Deer Park and Oakland, said. “This is one more way in which to spread the good news.”

Lee, who had a background in marketing and broadcast before becoming a minister at three Garrett County churches, including the log church on state Route 135 in Altamont, helped to guide his churches into the age of the Internet, and now reaches more than 15,000 people with the church’s podcasts, weekly broadcasts done available for download on iTunes.

He said that it took some persuasion to convince the churches that this was a natural step toward a more technological age, but also a way to draw new members into the church, even if they technically didn’t set foot in any of the three. However, much of the technology necessary, he said, was awarded through various grants within the diocese.

“Churches have recognized that they should have a good Web site because it’s good at attracting new families to the area,” Lee said. “The Internet has become almost a staple of daily life.”

He still emphasizes the biggest way for a church to get members remains the traditional method of invitation by friends or family, but since the podcasts have begun, he has gotten e-mail from people all over the world, including soldiers in Iraq and people living in Europe.

He added that the Web site currently has live feeds of the churches services as well as streaming audio from each service.

Read it all.

Google Inc. (GOOG)’s privacy practices are the worst among the Internet’s top destinations, according to a watchdog group seeking to intensify the recent focus on how the online search leader handles personal information about its users.

In a report released Saturday, London-based Privacy International assigned Google its lowest possible grade. The category is reserved for companies with “comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility to privacy.”

None of the 22 other surveyed companies – a group that included Yahoo Inc. (YHOO), Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and AOL – sunk to that level, according to Privacy International.

While a number of other Internet companies have troubling policies, none comes as close to Google to “achieving status as an endemic threat to privacy,” Privacy International said in an explanation of its findings.

In a statement from one of its lawyers, Google said it aggressively protects its users’ privacy and stands behind its track record. In its most conspicuous defense of user privacy, Google last year successfully fought a U.S. Justice Department subpoena demanding to review millions of search requests.

“We are disappointed with Privacy International’s report, which is based on numerous inaccuracies and misunderstandings about our services,” said Nicole Wong, Google’s deputy general counsel.

“It’s a shame that Privacy International decided to publish its report before we had an opportunity to discuss our privacy practices with them.”

Read it all.

First, let me say that I really enjoy blogging. It’s a brilliant format for keeping readers up to date on the things I care about””and for exchanging information with them. I recently asked Swampland readers with military experience to comment on whether it was General David Petraeus’ “duty” to tell the unvarnished truth about Iraq when he testifies on Capitol Hill in September. About a dozen readers responded with links to treatises about “duty” in various military journals. Furthermore, I’ve found that some great reporting takes place in the blogosphere: Juan Cole’s Iraq updates are invaluable, Joshua Micah Marshall’s Talking Points Memo did serious muckraking about the U.S. attorneys scandal, and Ezra Klein (no relation) is excellent on health care. I love linking to smart work by others, something you just can’t do in a print column.

But the smart stuff is being drowned out by a fierce, bullying, often witless tone of intolerance that has overtaken the left-wing sector of the blogosphere. Anyone who doesn’t move in lockstep with the most extreme voices is savaged and ridiculed””especially people like me who often agree with the liberal position but sometimes disagree and are therefore considered traitorously unreliable. Some of this is understandable: the left-liberals in the blogosphere are merely aping the odious, disdainful””and politically successful””tone that right-wing radio talk-show hosts like Rush Limbaugh pioneered. They are also justifiably furious at a Bush White House that has specialized in big lies and smear tactics.

And that is precisely the danger here. Fury begets fury. Poison from the right-wing talk shows seeped into the Republican Party’s bloodstream and sent that party off the deep end. Limbaugh’s show””where Dick Cheney frequently expatiates””has become the voice of the Republican establishment. The same could happen to the Democrats. The spitballs aimed at me don’t matter much. The spitballs aimed at Harman, Clinton and Obama are another story.

Read the whole piece.

He hasn’t paid taxes in 20 years, he tells IveScrewedUp.com.

“I keep moving and switching jobs to make it hard for the IRS to catch up with me,” the writer, who claims to be 38 and from Florida, taps into the keyboard. “I want to fix this but every time I think about it the anxiety grips me so that it causes convulsions.”

Similar hand-wringing from this guy at Notproud.com, another online confession site.

“All of my in-laws are so nice, they make the Brady Bunch look like the Manson family and it drives me nuts! There’s no grit or tension between any of them,” he gripes. “The family get-togethers make me wanna puke.”

Such anonymous soul-sharing, once reserved for the other side of a dark confessional booth, now unfolds daily in cyberspace. Visitors are encouraged to browse the Web sites ”” even to comment on the misdeeds of complete strangers.

Read it all.

Go you bears.

Amnesty International has warned that the internet “could change beyond all recognition” unless action is taken against the erosion of online freedoms.
The warning comes ahead of a conference organised by Amnesty, where victims of repression will outline their plights.

The “virus of internet repression” has spread from a handful of countries to dozens of governments, said the group.

Amnesty accused companies such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo of being complicit in the problem.

Read it all.

But you have to give Dr. Harmon his due: he has a Drudgelike ability to ferret out stories of all kinds from the Web, which makes his blog one of the most informative and interesting blogs out there. Moreover he, as an employee and official of the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina, takes some risk in presenting the various stories about the Episcopal/Anglican world he does. (Such a risk I can appreciate, since I too am an employee and official in my own church.) This is true especially when his own diocese is caught between a church that can’t bring itself to allow the bishop of their choice to take his rightful place in Charleston and an AMiA which enthrones itself in one of the Diocese’s one-time (that still isn’t resolved) superior properties, All Saints Pawley’s Island….

Even though Harmon has chosen to stay, some of those in the new Anglican churches in the U.S. are regulars there. What we are looking at is nothing short of the shape of things to come in general: a Paludavia like rescue of Americans by Third-world counterparts of like convictions. TEC is right to say that this is un-American, but it points out the central dilemma of American conservatism today: what do you do when the duly constituted authorities abandon the faith and ethic that made the church or country great? Today we have the spectacle of a very upper class church being governed in part by people from impoverished places, and hopefully that will help Anglicans here to see “how the other half lives” in a culture where the two halves grow further apart all the time.

One other observation that needs to be made is the level of theological discussion. This is fairly high, although Anglicans (and Orthodox) are too quick to recite formulae rather than get to the heart of an issue. One benefit I received from years in Roman Catholicism was the ability to penetrate past the formulas to first principles, although on its home turf the magisterium of the church (to say nothing of the level of discourse at the parish level) sometimes gets in the way of that. One would like to see this kind of erudition used, for example, in dialogue with Muslims. But it’s good to see it anywhere.

Kendall Harmon is to be commended for his work on Titusonenine. He has performed a service for a segment of Christianity that needs it. We trust that God will continue to bless him, his family, the elves, and, yes, his visitors, and that he may continue to be one “who holds doctrine that can be relied on as being in accordance with the accepted Teaching; so that he may be able to encourage others by sound teaching, as well as to refute our opponents.”

Read it all.

Jogging in Atlanta a year ago, Chris Tuff tripped and fell. As his girlfriend, Julie Augustyniak, tried to help him up, Mr. Tuff, already on bended knee, pulled a diamond ring from his gym shorts.

“Julie, I love you more than anything in the world,” he said. Unbeknownst to Ms. Augustyniak, a cameraman lurking in a parked car nearby zoomed in and recorded her running into the street, screaming. She eventually calmed down enough to say yes — on camera

In case you missed this scene, you can now watch it on the couple’s wedding Web site www.doublemintwedding.com. At the bottom of their home page is a poll asking guests whether posting the engagement video online is a) very cute, b) cheesy, c) classic, or d) Chris’s idea.

Wedding Web sites — also known as “Wed sites” — were originally conceived as a convenient way for couples to notify guests of wedding events, provide directions and link to gift registries. Now they are turning into elaborate hubs of matrimonial exhibitionism, with confessional stories, courtship videos, and blow-by-blow accounts of the preparations.

In the “News and Updates” section on her Web site, bride-to-be Monika Razpotnik griped that making her own centerpieces was “a disaster,” finding a band was “a nightmare,” and looking for a dress was “a total disappointment.”

Read it all

First came the online network informally known as St. Blog’s. Then came the invasion of the Catholic podcasters.

Now it’s “vodcasts.”

The latest innovation on the Internet is the rise of Catholic video podcasts, otherwise known as vodcasts. Through YouTube and other media, Catholics have been able to spread the faith, provide historical footage and draw attention to liturgical abuses.

Denham Springs, La., software developer William Eunice describes YouTube, the Internet video portal that allows users to post short videos online, as a “scratchpad for our culture.”

“The Catholic content gets to the heart of what my Catholic faith is about,” said Eunice, who writes for the website CatholicDaily.org. “It’s real information that helps me in my life as a Catholic.”

Such resources are utilizing both audio and video to show the richness of the Catholic community, says blogger Rocco Palmo. He has been impressed with how some dioceses are using online video. The Diocese of Salt Lake City, for example, makes liturgies at the cathedral available online.

“No diocese in the country has made that kind of commitment,” said Palmo, whose blog is called Whispers in the Loggia (WhispersintheLoggia.blogspot.com). “They have really been the pioneers.”

The Archdiocese of Philadelphia’s Cardinal Justin Rigali became the first Church leader to make regular use of YouTube. Every week of Lent, Cardinal Rigali presented a weekly two- to four-minute video reflection on the Gospels called “Living Lent.”

Read it all.