The Shift from ‘Alleviating Poverty’ to ‘Creating Prosperity’
Poor countries aren’t poor because they lack tangible things like clothes or electricity or education. They are poor because they lack the intangible foundations of social justice that enable people to create wealth for themselves and their communities, things like clear property title, freedom to start and register a business, access to networks of productivity and circles of exchange, and the expectation that their business contract will be honored and they’ll receive justice and fair resolution if it isn’t. We can take these intangibles for granted, but without them long-term, sustainable wealth creation is impossible.
Solving Poverty Is Rocket Science
But here’s the problem: Poverty, whether here in America or abroad, is one of the oldest and most complex problems plaguing the human race. It is tangled in social, cultural, economic, political, ethnic, geographic, and spiritual factors that challenge even the most skilled experts. Simple solutions just don’t work, and well-meaning amateurs can not only waste valuable resources but even cause unintended harm in their efforts.
Why I’ll Never Play the Lottery
I will never play the lottery. Why? Because I can’t think of anything worse than winning.
I realize this sounds crazy. It may even seem straight-up un-American. Not that everyone plays, but to be so vehemently against winning? Who wouldn’t want free money? But here’s the thing: It’s not free. It comes with a price. And the price I’d pay for hitting the jackpot would never be worth it to me.
I fell in love with a megachurch
I was used to leaving church feeling guilty for my sins from the previous week, for letting my mind wander to sex while Latin words rolled off an old priest’s tongue. But after Lakewood, I felt lighter, like I had handed some of my burden over to … God? Did that mean I believed in Him? Had the energy of this place pulled me here, or was it something bigger?
Bigger is not necessarily better, but neither is smaller necessarily better. Small is not the goal. Let’s face it; a small church that reaches people becomes a larger church and this is a good thing. Healthy churches grow and reproduce.
We have many reasons to affirm small churches, but romanticizing them is unhelpful to the mission. So without idealizing the small church, let’s value it.
Survey: Evangelicals Increasingly Countercultural on Same-Sex Issues
For instance, over a third of “Practicing Catholics” think same-sex relationships are morally sound, a marked increase since 2003. Those who identified as “Practicing Protestants,” on the other hand, show the least moral support among religious groups, with only 15 percent of 2013 respondents believing that same-sex marriages are morally acceptable. Evangelicals pronounced an even stronger rejection of the morality of same-sex relationships, with the percentage of disapproving respondents jumping from 95 percent to 98 percent.
When Social Sharing Goes Wrong: Regretting The Facebook Post
But the nature of online and offline regret is also quite different. Evidence from real-world-regret literature (yes, there are many studies in this area) show that what we regret in real life tends to be what we don’t do — we regret inaction because of the fear of negative outcomes. For example, when we regret not telling people how we really feel about them.
But research indicates that Facebook users regret their action instead of inaction, “in which the impulsiveness of sharing or posting on Facebook may blind users to the negative outcomes of posts even if the outcome is immediate,” the Carnegie Mellon researchers wrote.
How to Fix Your Attention Span
Most of the daily content we consume—what gets our attention—is just a distraction from the real work we’re called to do. And, in this crazy information age, we need to be vigilant with our attention. We’re only given so much to spend. Herbert A. Simon, a Nobel Prize winner, once wrote: “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a death of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.”
Genetics Are Awesome, Photographer Explores Resemblance in Family Members
Ulric Collette is a French-Canadian photographer who does some quirky portrait work. In his photo series “Genetic Portraits” he photographs family members and then cuts them side by side to create one portrait. The end result makes you notice the similarities between the people photographed, and how fascinating genetics really are. One really cool thing I noticed, is if you cover one half of the image with your hand, and then the other half, you can clearly picture how different each person is, but then when you look at them both, you notice so many similarities.