Blogging Break

I’ll be taking a break from blogging until Sept. 1!

Pop Goes The Culture (Chapter 4)

I am currently reading a book called “Pop Goes The Church: Should the Church Engage Pop Culture” by Tim Stevens. I’m reading this book with three other guys…. all of whom are pastors and much wiser than I…. and we’re going to record our thoughts about each chapter on our respective blogs. The other bloggers/readers are: Dan Hudson, Nate Liston and Mike Demastus.

Chapter 4

This chapter is called “A tale of 5 churches” and chronicles the stories of how churches respond to pop culture. Some respond by condemning it and some respond by embracing it.

* The question is not “Does pop culture have an influence?” but what am I going to do with it?

* Which attribute of God is greater? Holiness or Love? Many churches seem to lean toward the holiness side when they choose to condemn culture.

* Good examples of how to embrace pop culture are when movies, such as Spider-Man 3, are released. These movies could be used by the church as a springboard to teach about forgiveness, regret, destiny and choices. Also, when movies like The DaVinci Code are released, the church should not ignore this.

* The five ways churches can respond to pop culture, as Stevens points out, is to condemn, to separate themselves, to embrace the culture, to ignore it, or to leverage it. All valid points!

That’s quotable

He does much who loves much.

— Thomas à Kempis

Homeless

Tonight we visited a “tent camp” for homeless people so that we could rescue some homeless animals… that is to say cats owned by homeless people.

It’s a humbling experience to visit these tent camps. But it’s also encouraging. It’s humbling because these people have literally nothing but each other, and yet they seem quite happy. Many of us need TVs, football games and iPods to be happy. We think we have it tough when the Internet is down!

It was encouraging because we’re able to help these people, and they were very appreciative. We took five cats from the camp; three went to the local animal shelter for adoption and two are going to our vet, who has graciously offered to spay the cats for free. This will help keep the cat population under control, at least in that area of the world. There are eight more cats there who we hope to be able to rescue or spay.

Mrs Vhost is the inspiration for our little trip. She really cares about animals and is willing to step outside her comfort zone to help.

Best Antivirus

A few people have asked me what I recommend for anti-virus.

If you don’t want to spend any money, take a look at AVG, a free anti-virus software. It can do the job, and doesn’t cost anything.

But my overall top recommendation is NOD32. It’s an excellent AV program, and takes very little memory and other resources. NOD32 costs about $30 a year.

BTW, I do not recommend Norton (Symantec) or McAfee. Those programs are bloated with junk you don’t want or need, and can oftentimes block too much, causing you a sharp pain in your side.

Are you using Firefox?

If you haven’t heard of Firefox, it is an Internet web browser (an alternative to Internet Explorer) that is growing in popularity. I’ve been using Firefox for 3 years. Originally, I started using Firefox for two reasons: tabbed browsing, and because Internet Explorer 6 was so insecure. Internet Explorer 7 now offers tabs and it has security covered well, but I still prefer Firefox. Why? Add-ons!

There are multiple third-party add-ons that give Firefox added functionality.

One of my favorite add-ons is called Foxmarks. Foxmarks allows you to save your favorites (aka bookmarks) across multiple computers. So I have my main computer at home, plus a laptop, plus my wife’s computer, and my computer at work…. and thanks to Foxmarks my favorites are identical on all four computers. Synchronization occurs via the Internet.

Other popular add-ons for Firefox are ad blockers (blocks ads on web pages), video downloader (save YouTube videos to your hard drive), a Gmail enhancer, a web developer toolbox, hacker tools (for testing purposes of course), download managers, and one add-on actually lets you open a tab as an Internet Explorer tab (in case you find a web site that works better with Internet Explorer). There are literally hundreds of Firefox add-ons available on Mozilla’s web site. Some add functionality and some just add neat bells and whistles to the look an feel of the browser.