What Else Is On My Mindgrapes? #19
Still With Me
Earlier this summer I read Max Fisher’s incredible book about the dangers of social media, The Chaos Machine. As many of you know, I have limited (read: left) social media this year. Without a doubt, I believe social media plays a central and powerful role in creating a church, country, and world that is less and less able to hear one another. Social media radicalizes us. Fisher puts it this way:
“Remember that the number of seconds in your day never changes. The amount of social media content competing for those seconds, however, doubles every year or so, depending on how you measure it. Imagine, for instance, that your network produces 200 posts a day of which you have time to read about 100. Because of the platform's tilt, you will see the most outraged half of your feed. Next year, when 200 doubles to 400, you will see the most outraged quarter, the year after that the most outraged eighth. Over time, your impression of your own community becomes radically more moralizing, aggrandizing, and outraged, and so do you, at the same time, less innately engaging forms of content. Truth appeals to the greater good, appeals to tolerance, become more and more outmatched, like stars over Times Square.”
I think you (and your children) would benefit from giving this a read.
4 Weeks On
It’s been 4-weeks now since my brother, Richard died. I had the honor of writing his obituary. The website from the the funeral home is still open to his obituary. I don’t know when I will be able to close that tab.
Books I Read
Glen Scrivener’s The Air We Breathe: How We All Came to Believe in Freedom, Kindness, Progress, and Equality. It is so insightful upon until the last two chapters and then devolves into the kind of lecture a first year seminary student might give. That said, up until then, it’s outstanding.
Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain. The follow-up to Freakonomics, this is another thoughtful look at how we can think better.
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty This is a word, not just for nations, but organizations, and families.
Films I Screened
Articles I’ve Written
One Little Spark (on preaching for imagination)
The Death of Preaching (on Artificial Intelligence and kerygma)
Podcast
With my friends from the Around the Circle Podcast, I talk Wakanda Forever and the Enneagram. Check it out HERE!