Month: April 2005

i’m very excited over the fact that i’m going to get the chance to go to philadelphia in october and spend some time with the folks at the simple way. the simple way is a church that is based on the concept of community. many of the folks at the simple way live together at the church, work together, and all of them are consciously involved in each other’s live during the week. ever since i heard the story of the beginning of their church (it’s an incredible story that i will try to link to if i can find it) i’ve been wanting to spend some time getting to know the folks at the simple way.

so i have my wife’s consent (she wouldn’t call it “consent” but i do), i have the time on the church calendar, and i think i’ll have the money necessary to get to phillie. now all i have to do is actually be able to contact them. i’ve been calling the simple way for two weeks and a lady named rose has been calling back. we’ve played “phone tag” the entire time. what i have discovered through the various messages is that it should be no problem for me to go to the simple way.

UPDATE – i finally got through to the simple way and had a great but short conversation with justin. he thinks october should be good but needs to run it past the group. so i’m almost there. he did recommend that i read “schools for conversion: 12 marks of a new monasticism” which is put out by some friends of the simple way.

after a little bit of effort and allot of time waiting for the youth ministry domain name to kick back into gear i have finally been able to set us up with podcasting ability. here’s what i had to do:

• obviously we had to convert the audio from our youth service to an mp3 format and store it on our website.
• next, i set up a blogger site for the mp3 files so that i can use it’s atom feed. i set the “link” feature of the post to the url of the mp3 file and just for extra insurance i setup the text of the post as a link to the url of the mp3 file.
• third, i went to feed burner and used their smartcast feature (it’s under the “additional services” section of the feed you set up with feed burner). this gave me a new site feed url. this is the address that i have posted for people to subscribe too. the site feed for receiving the podcast is http://feeds.feedburner.com/ViewPodcast.

now we can podcast our worship services to anyone who wishes to automatically download the mp3 files of our weekly services. sometimes i love technology.

i’ve decided that i’m going to try and start podcasting the music and messages from the view, our youth worship service. this whole thing is new to me so it will take a little while to figure out the specifics of the whole thing. since, i just ordered an ipod today i figured i should start podcasting the services.

of course, i also have to wait for our youth ministry site to be up and running again. for some reason our domain name expired. the reason i say “for some reason” is because i remember and jessica, the youth administrative assistant, remembers sending the check for renewal of our domain name. anyhow i called the company last night and charged the renewal. they said it would take 24 hours for the domain name to kick back into gear.

article – the observer | international | “how many more must die before kofi quits?”

the u.n. sucks! the article puts it pretty clearly too. ironically this article is all about consistency also (like my previous post). the point of this article is that the u.n under kofi’s leadership has betrayed the very ideals that “the left” has stood for both in the u.s. and the u.k. yet “the left” has supported the u.n. against “the conservatives” because they view being against the conservatives as their primary role. they abandon their ideals because of politics and needing to be different from “the right.”

it would be nice if we could consistently support freedom in the world (even if it is proposed by the u.n.) and consistently fight evil in the world (even if it is in the u.n.).

i ran across the following quote in the lastest (april 6, 2005) issue of sojourner’s sojo mail:

Personally, I cannot understand why parents willing to take care of their disabled daughter were not allowed to by a husband who had moved on to another life and family. Terri Schiavo was severely mentally disabled but was not dying, and we don’t decide to end the lives of many similarly disabled people, even children, whose mental capacities greatly diminish their quality of life. As my wife, Joy Carroll, put it, “the issue is not their quality of life, but the ethical quality of our society.” And in situations of medical, scientific, or legal complexity, the morally safer course is always to err on the side of life. However, it became painfully clear that for many political partisans the issue wasn’t so much the life of this young woman but other related political issues and agendas. And a leaked Republican memo about firing up the conservative base of the party and even defeating Democratic opponents in Florida were way out of line.

wallis’ point is not exactly about terri schavio, rather he is talking about being consistent across the board. we do not live in a very consistent society. thus our republicans love to protect fetuses and execute criminals while our democrats love to do the exact opposite. neither group can truly claim to be “pro-life.” instead they are “pro” their political party. we really are a screwed up group of people.

i was talking with j.t. about flickr and while i was talking i ran into this image from lomokev (one of my flickr contacts) which actually looks like j.t. so i decided to post the photo as an example. hey j.t.