unshackled

If you’re reading this in a feed reader and haven’t seen the site in awhile, go ahead and click through, there’s been big changes recently.

I’m moving away from a “journal” type blog and have moved towards a “tumblelog”, where links, photos, videos, or whatever frequently update the front page. There’s lots of reasons I am doing this; I won’t get into all of them now.

But here’s the biggest one. Personal blogs are no longer the place where conversation happens on the internet. Instead, social networks and 2.0 sites like Facebook and Friendfeed are taking over and personal blogs are still reeling as to exactly where they should fit in. That’s one of the reasons I disabled comments here. Conversations are much easier to handle on places like Twitter, Facebook, and Friendfeed. This blog will increasingly become more of an aggregator for all my social addictions such as Flickr rather than a one-stop destination for original content.

That having been said, I still think there is value in well thought out articles being published to the web. But as you probably noticed, I haven’t spent much time in doing so recently. Still, if you want to continue to follow only my original content, subscribe to the RSS feed for “articles”, a category in which I will place any original content I happen to produce. The main RSS feed will continue to include my latest articles, as well as any other links, pictures, or videos that I found interesting.

WWDC meant Twitter would definitely be put to the test. And ready it was. It had to limit API requests to 10 per hour, but hey, it stayed up for the most part. Congrats to the Twitter team on that accomplishment. It was a good day.

Now that iPhones are cheaper than the iPod Touch, will the Touch line also see a price slash? I sure hope so.

Tomorrow morning me and my brother will be boarding a plane for El Salvador. I’ll be there more than three weeks and during that time I will not use the internet regularly. Ciao!

I’ll have some awesome pictures when I get back if my Pentax K1000 doesn’t fail me.

I mean as if you haven’t heard 300 times already. WWDC IS TOMORROW!

What gives? A new iPhone, a new Mac, Snow Leopard?

It promises to be the most underrated and overrated event of the year as always. Anyway I’m excited but right now I just wish I could sleep. I slept too long this afternoon and now I am so awake.

I’m leaving for El Salvador on Tuesday. It will be hot I think.

‘nuf said, right?

From an email I got 2 minutes ago:

I want to congratulate Senator Obama and his supporters on the extraordinary race that they have run. Senator Obama has inspired so many Americans to care about politics and empowered so many more to get involved, and our party and our democracy are stronger and more vibrant as a result.

Whatever path I travel next, I promise I will keep faith with you and everyone I have met across this good and great country. There is no possible way to thank you enough for everything you have done throughout this primary season, and you will always be in my heart.

Sincerely,

Hillary

Does this mean she’s conceding? Or what is she saying? Please can this just be over with?

I have eleven drafts in ecto that I never published either because I never finished writing them or I didn’t feel comfortable making them public once I was finished.

I don’t feel like tackling any of those subjects right now, so I’ll give a quick life update. Yes, I am done with school, and yes, it felt amazing walking out those walls of mortar a free man. Graduation was nothing spectacular, just a regular ceremony which we commenced with a harmony of screams reminiscent of a Showbread song intro. Awesome.

It’s weird saying goodbye to that era of my life, yet it’s not as if it was a gradual goodbye decision. It was like a heavy door slammed in my face. Suddenly here I am back home surrounded by people I love yet still feeling somewhat like a stranger in my own world. But the reality I just left is over–over so clearly that it almost seems as if it never existed. Like I said, a door slammed shut. It’s over.

The future seems nonexistent, as if it’s out there somewhere but it’ll never really arrive. I’m stuck in the now which looks like a dreary brown line leading nowhere but always plodding on. Stuck by a gray carpet.

I seem dead to myself and almost everyone these days. Maybe I’ll wake up next week, when I’m heading to El Salvador for almost a month.

the new era

trashbags too big to fill
thrown together at last for real
no longer relegated to a backburner
but now serving their purpose
an end to an era.

what is it that begs
to be cried about?
so much talk yet not for long
we seldom wait before we sleep
and look sharp and slowly then.

careful, careful. the writing’s on the wall
the hands are at the top.
this road is still fresh with old tears
mine, yet not mine.
nonexistent in my recent memory
sealed by fate.
lost in love.

The Evangelical Universalist is a fascinating read and maybe I’m just pessimistic, but I’m wondering how well “evangelical” and “universalist” can really fit together. Some excerpts:

Origen’s pastoraly wise universalism

Sometimes, like the OT prophets or like Jesus himself, we need to warn of the coming warth without making mention of restoration after destruction.

Should we form universalist congregations?

[Universalism] is important but it is not fundamental to healthy and obedient Christian living.

Is it just me or is this view of universalism missing the point? Why should we resort to fundamentalist scare tactics when evangelizing but use universalism in the back closet to pat ourselves on the back for acknowledging an idea about the way God looks at us and the world?

God’s restoration is good news, not bad.

I mean this guy is more annoying than Brian McLaren. He has an ego-mania that has annoyed me ever since I read his book Confessions of a Reformission Rev. more than two years ago. Uh yeah. Who isn’t annoyed by Mark Driscoll?

Anyway, awhile ago one of my Republican friends was reading Shane Claibourne’s Jesus For President (or “utopian crap” as he called it), he spied the infamous Mark Driscoll quote that Shane inserted in a page without comment.

There is a strong drift toward the hard theological left. Some emergent types [want] to recast Jesus as a limp-wrist hippie in a dress with a lot of product in His hair, who drank decaf and made pithy Zen statements about life while shopping for the perfect pair of shoes. In Revelation, Jesus is a pride fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is a guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up. I fear some are becoming more cultural than Christian, and without a big Jesus who has authority and hates sin as revealed in the Bible, we will have less and less Christians, and more and more confused, spiritually self-righteous blogger critics of Christianity.

My friend loved it. But I was mean enough to finally break it to him that Shane most likely disagreed with the quote and was using it as an illustration of an extremist view. That didn’t go down well.

I had totally forgotten about this until Halden recently tackled the statement straight up. I’m not going to join the noise surrounding Driscoll, because it’s not worth my time, but check it out if you’re interested.

If you ask me though, Driscoll’s most disturbing statement to date was from a sermon a few years ago.

You have been told that God is a loving, gracious, merciful, kind, compassionate, wonderful, and good sky fairy who runs a day care in the sky and has a bucket of suckers for everyone because we’re all good people. That is a lie… God looks down and says ‘I hate you, you are my enemy, and I will crush you,’ and we say that is deserved, right and just, and then God says ‘Because of Jesus I will love you and forgive you.’ This is a miracle.

Maybe Driscoll is revolutionary in the fact that he actually does soteriology that many people hold but refuse to explore. A theology that says Jesus wasn’t God. Jesus was the trickster who got slaughtered because of an agreement God had made with Himself. But by Jesus bleeding, God was able to fool Himself into thinking we were actually innocent and Jesus was the bad guy who had done all the bad stuff.

And that makes a damn lot of sense.

Update: Even Graham has come out of the woodwork to comment.

I’ve now turned comments off on this blog.

As always, you can contact me via email, Twitter, or Facebook.

-ak

Sex education in a Christian school is one of the funniest dilemmas ever.

“You should never, ever have sex before you’re married. But if you ever have premarital sex, by all means wear a condom.”

C’mon. I can’t be the only one that thinks that’s funny.