Trump Has Changed White Evangelicals’ Views On Morality In One Major Way

Altogether, there has been a stunning 42-percentage-point swing in white evangelicals’ opinions on this issue since 2011. Other religious groups experienced some shifts, but nothing quite as dramatic, Campbell said. Religiously unaffiliated Americans showed a 5-percentage-point change in the opposite direction, with more saying that private immorality translates to unethical public behavior.

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This Church Is Building a Tiny House Village for the Homeless on Their Campus

The city of Portland has a large homeless community, but Central Church of the Nazarene is doing something to help. They are building “Agape Village” on church property, which will feature 15 specially designed “tiny houses.”

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6 Important Differences Between Performance Music And Worship Music

1. In performance, the focus is on the musicians. In worship, the focus is on Jesus.
2. In performance, those on stage might be the only ones singing. In worship, everyone should be singing along.
3. In performance, the words should support the melody. In worship, the melody should support the words.
4. In performance, the integrity of the musicians is secondary. In worship, the integrity of the musicians is essential.
5. Virtuoso musical flourishes can attract you to a performance, but they distract from worship.
6. Performers need to be skilled musicians. Worship leaders need to be committed worshipers.

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Who Are the Outcasts in (Some) Churches?

1. Divorcees.
2. Special needs persons.
3. Widows.
4. Homosexuals.
5. Families of suicide victims.

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TurboTax intentionally hides its free tax filing service from Google search results

According to a new report, Intuit purposefully stopped Google from surfacing its free tax filing service in search results in an effort to steer all consumers — no matter their income — toward the company’s paid services. Intuit added code to the robots.txt file on its website that instructed Google to leave TurboTax Free File out of search results.

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What About Capitalizing Pronouns Referring to God?

If you capitalize pronouns that refer to God to show reverence for His name, fantastic! Continue doing so. If you capitalize pronouns that refer to God to make it more clear who is being referred to, great! Continue doing so. If you are not capitalizing pronouns that refer to God because you believe proper English grammar/syntax/style should be followed, wonderful! Continue following your conviction. Again, this is not a right vs. wrong issue. Each of us must follow his/her own conviction and each of us should refrain from judging those who take a different viewpoint.

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Pastoring the One When You’d Rather Pastor the Ninety-Nine

One-on-one pastoral care is every pastor’s inefficient imperative. It invariably seems we could get more done if we were left alone to study or plan, or if we could be with a group of our people all at once to teach or worship or just eat together. There is this powerful instinct to always shepherd the flock in bunches, in herds, because it seems patently obvious we’d get more done. But efficiency is a poor pastoral master.

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When Did Pop Culture Become Homework?

I am not telling those people not to watch or listen to or read or find meaning there, I understand people have different tastes, that certain things are popular because they speak to us in a way other things haven’t. At the same time, I expect not to be told what to watch or listen to or read, because from what I see and hear around me, from what I read and who I talk to, I can define for myself what I need.

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Parrot taken into custody by police in Brazil for trying to warn drug dealers of raid

When the green-and-white bird spotted officers Tuesday at its owners’ Teresina home, the parrot squawked “Mama, Police!” in Portuguese, according to the local outlet Oliberal.com.

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Seabird Photobombs London Traffic Cam, Becomes Internet Sensation

As CBS News reports, a herring gull recently became a viral sensation after it perched itself directly in front of a camera and looked around lackadaisically as cars crept along in the background.

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Is It Wrong to Celebrate Religious Days Like Christmas and Easter?

I know of no principle, command, example, or implication of Scripture that is violated by observing special days in honor of the Lord. In fact, Scripture seems to specifically allow for this practice. But most importantly, we must be careful not to judge and despise one another over these things, but welcome one another as Christ has welcomed us (Romans 14-15).

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Evangelism More Prayed for Than Practiced by Churchgoers

Most Protestant churchgoers say they are eager to talk to others about Jesus and are praying for opportunities to share their faith, but most say they have not had any evangelistic conversations in the past six months.

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U.S. Public Has Favorable View of Israel’s People, but Is Less Positive Toward Its Government

A substantial majority of Americans – 64% – say they have a favorable opinion of the Israeli people. However, fewer than half (41%) have a favorable view of the Israeli government; a larger share (51%) views the government unfavorably.

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Supreme Court to Decide Whether ‘Sex’ Includes Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

On Monday the Supreme Court announced it has accepted three cases involving homosexuals and transgender persons who claim they were discriminated against at work. The Court will rule on whether current federal anti-discrimination laws protect employees based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

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Why Conservatives Are So Angry About Obama’s Reference to “Easter Worshippers”

By my count, Beto O’Rourke is the only major 2020 presidential candidate who used the word Christian in his tweet lamenting the attacks. That includes Trump, who mentioned the “attack on churches and hotels” but did not as of yet name the religious group who might have been worshipping in those churches.

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Lost in Translation: Lessons from Language Can Help Us Share the Gospel

If translation and immersion go together, then those beyond the boundaries of our churches must not only hear us speak of it, but also become immersed in it through our relationships and through the life of our Christ following communities.

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Chip Away at Your Children’s Spiritual Growth

God, in his mercy, has seen fit to impress one little truth upon another in their lives. Our tiny, but frequent (not perfect! not even daily!) investments are paying off. This is not to say—at all—that my girls have arrived. It is not to claim that they’ve made it to Christian maturity. There are still so many ways I look forward to seeing them grow. This is only to say that God has been faithful to us, in spite of our weak offerings, our imperfect skill, our laziness, our quick-get-this-done mentality at times.

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Sizing Up Twitter Users

The analysis indicates that the 22% of American adults who use Twitter are representative of the broader population in certain ways, but not others. Twitter users are younger, more likely to identify as Democrats, more highly educated and have higher incomes than U.S. adults overall. Twitter users also differ from the broader population on some key social issues. For instance, Twitter users are somewhat more likely to say that immigrants strengthen rather than weaken the country and to see evidence of racial and gender-based inequalities in society. But on other subjects, the views of Twitter users are not dramatically different from those expressed by all U.S. adults.

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Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click

Based on a study of individuals entering identical search terms at the same time, we found that:

1. Most participants saw results unique to them.
2. On the first page of search results, Google included links for some participants that it did not include for others, even when logged out and in private browsing mode.
3. Results within the news and videos infoboxes also varied significantly.
4. Private browsing mode and being logged out of Google offered very little filter bubble protection.

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When can we finally get rid of passwords?

Passwords are the main system that keeps our digital lives secure, but they’re increasingly not up to the task. Most people reuse an endless series of easy-to-guess phrases, and the underlying technology is also vulnerable to a wide range of attacks. All a hacker needs to do is convince you that their dodgy website or email is from your bank or other online service, and they can trick you into revealing your password (a so-called “phishing” attack) and gain entry to your account.

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The 1 Thing I’d Say to Christians about Politics and Public Life

But now what I’m worried about is that we will emphasize the need for cultural reform to the near exclusion of our need for revival. If we manage to score short-term political victories—and thus short-term reform of legal institutions, educational laws, and business practices—but do not experience revival, our cultural reform will be for naught.

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More

The worry is that if we make things important they become necessary, and if they become necessary they become lines in the sand that create rifts of fellowship, locations of judgmentalism and exclusion. So in my tradition, for example, the worry is that if we start making baptism mean more we’ll drift back toward our traditional sectarian stance. And since we don’t want that, we just downplay the importance of baptism.

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When a Group Leaves the Church: Five Perspectives

1. The exit usually takes place when the pastor’s leadership becomes clear and established.
2. Hurt exiting church members do not often leave well.
3. Those often neglected are the members who remain.
4. The recovery period usually takes months.
5. The other side is a place of hope.

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A New Tool for Teaching Textual Criticism to English Speakers

Of course, I don’t want to be in the business of figuring out how many variants can be introduced before doctrine changes, but I’ll observe that the Holy Spirit has already entered that business. The reason I can’t bring myself to believe that there is a “doctrine of perfect preservation” is both that it misinterprets various Scripture passages and that every jot and tittle is every jot and tittle. Unless we not only have every last stroke of the pen but have perfect confidence in which strokes belong and which don’t (even if one prefers the TR, what does he do with its variants?), God has not given us a world in which the Bible has been perfectly preserved. That is the standard Jesus sets up in Matthew 5:18—if indeed his words are talking about preservation at all, and not efficacy. Naturally, I take the latter view. The Spirit gave us a remarkably but not perfectly pure NT textual stream. I choose to be thankful rather than to demand better.

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What I Learned From Learning How to Say No

This type of learning, like nearly everything else, takes practice. When I realized that I needed to get better at saying no, I started with extremely low-stakes situations, such as telling an acquaintance that I couldn’t meet up for drinks. When I realized that saying no in a single situation didn’t cause a chain-reaction of unwanted consequences—like, the acquaintance didn’t hate me forever, we saw each other at another social event and it was fine—I practiced saying no to close friends. Still fine. Miraculously, our friendship survived the great “I don’t feel like tacos tonight” incident of 2016, which prepared me for more difficult decisions like “I won’t be able to join the big friend trip this year.”

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The compass and the map

Happy endings come from an understanding of the compass, not the presence of a useful map. If you’ve got the wrong map, the right compass will get you home if you know how to use it.

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Understanding Facebook’s Algorithm Could Change How You See Yourself

Ultimately, we need to remind ourselves that the platforms analyzing our online behavior are only interested in aspects of ourselves that they can monetize. We should treat their depictions of us with the same wariness and suspicion we’d offer any human salesperson aiming to manipulate us.

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Mark Zuckerberg leveraged Facebook user data to fight rivals and help friends, leaked documents show

The documents, which include emails, webchats, presentations, spreadsheets and meeting summaries, show how Zuckerberg, along with his board and management team, found ways to tap Facebook’s trove of user data — including information about friends, relationships and photos — as leverage over companies it partnered with. In some cases, Facebook would reward favored companies by giving them access to the data of its users. In other cases, it would deny user-data access to rival companies or apps.

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Michelin restaurants and fabulous wines: Inside the secret team dinners that have built the Spurs’ dynasty

Says one former player: “I was friends with every single teammate I ever had in my [time] with the Spurs. That might sound far-fetched, but it’s true. And those team meals were one of the biggest reasons why. To take the time to slow down and truly dine with someone in this day and age — I’m talking a two- or three-hour dinner — you naturally connect on a different level than just on the court or in the locker room. It seems like a pretty obvious way to build team chemistry, but the tricky part is getting everyone to buy in and actually want to go. You combine amazing restaurants with an interesting group of teammates from a bunch of different countries and the result is some of the best memories I have from my career.”

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The Time the U.S. Government Planned to Nuke Alaska

In 1958, the AEC and physicist Edward Teller proposed the first step in this bold new direction: Project Chariot. The plan was to detonate a 1-megaton H-bomb near Cape Thompson in Alaska along with several other, smaller explosions to create a crater 1000 feet in diameter and 110 feet deep. The resulting deepwater harbor would facilitate mineral mining and fishing access. The U.S. government rhapsodized about the idea in the media, claiming the then-contemporary weapons had low fallout and would create a port that would be nothing but a net gain for Alaskans.

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Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people

Typing text on a screen and reading it out loud does not count as teaching. An audience reading text off the screen does not count as learning. Imagine if the engineers had put up a slide with just: “foam strike more than 600 times bigger than test data.” Maybe NASA would have listened. Maybe they wouldn’t have attempted re-entry. Next time you’re asked to give a talk remember Columbia. Don’t just jump to your laptop and write out slides of text. Think about your message. Don’t let that message be lost amongst text. Death by PowerPoint is a real thing. Sometimes literally.

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School daze: Contractor misspells crosswalk

When the Bible Confronts Your Confirmation Bias

Proverbs 18:17 forces us to stay silent until we know the truth. This means doing something counter-cultural in the social media era–don’t share stories or your opinion about a story until you have investigated its truthfulness. “This sounds true to me” is not enough. “I’ve heard of other stories like this” will not suffice. Allow the story to be cross-examined. Hear the other side of the story so clearly that you can articulate it yourself. Only then should you speak up and Solomon has plenty to say about how you do.

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Must women really keep silent in the churches?

Paul does not want anything to happen during corporate worship that would upset the headship principle that he so carefully exhorted them to obey in 1 Cor. 11:2-16. For that reason, he enjoins women in this context to refrain from the judgment of prophecies. He’s not commanding an absolute silence on the part of women. Indeed he expects them to be praying and prophesying.

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Can We Touch?

The research is clear on that fact that people both need and react well to physical touch—in controlled environments. There is no evidence that people like to be touched any less than in previous generations, only that negatively received touch is more openly vocalized. What’s new is that people who didn’t appreciate being touched in previous decades, or who were always made uncomfortable by it, especially from people in positions of power, are empowered to process the fact that it’s not something they need to put up with. They have platforms for speaking up, channels for recourse, and supportive listeners to cushion the blowback.

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The Democratic Electorate on Twitter Is Not the Actual Democratic Electorate

In reality, the Democratic electorate is both ideologically and demographically diverse. Over all, around half of Democratic-leaning voters consider themselves “moderate” or “conservative,” not liberal. Around 40 percent are not white.

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Why airlines make flights longer on purpose

In the 1960s it took five hours to fly from New York to Los Angeles, and just 45 minutes to hop from New York to Washington, DC. Today, these same flights now take six-plus hours and 75 minutes respectively, although the airports haven’t moved further apart.

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7-Eleven owner sends shoplifting teen home with food instead of calling 911

As Singh’s employee called 911 and had a dispatcher on the phone, the boy told Singh why he was stealing. “He said, ‘I’m stealing for myself. I’m hungry, and I’m doing it for my younger brother,'” Singh told ABC 13.
Singh asked his employee to hang up.
“I said, ‘Well that’s not food. You’re stealing gum and candies. That’s just something for munching,'” Singh, who has owned the store for five years, told CNN. “I said, ‘If you’re hungry, ask me. I’ll give you food.'”
According to a user on Facebook who witnessed the scene, Singh packed up chicken wings, sausage rolls, a whole pizza and a 2-liter bottle of soda for the teenager.

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