May it be so…

Great video from one of my favorite bands, mewithoutYou.  Their latest album, It’s All Crazy! It’s All False! It’s All A Dream! It’s Alright. is a gem.

Unfortunately, embedding is disabled, but please take the extra second & check this out:

The Fox, The Crow, & The Cookie

the double eagle

last night i had the privilege to hang out with 130 middle school students all night long at our annual all-nighter called “That Thing.”  we had a blast at the Kent State Rec Center for the night playing basketball, dodgeball, soccer, swimming, rock climbing, eating and generally being goofy.  as part of the night, we shared who Christ is through a little video that my pal, Derke Urey, helped me make.  Take a look & let me know what you think…

Melting…

the Reverend Doctor contest round 2 (click here for explanation)…use this creatively in a presentation of some sort and get free things from me:

ht to ysmarko

message prep meets web 2.0

sometimes i wonder if technology is more of a benefit or a detriment to my lifestyle and ministry.  it’s a cause of a lot of procrastination.  it’s a seemingly endless distraction for tangential pursuits.  as i’ve shared often publicly, it’s also been a significant part of the problem in my struggles with porn.  

but despite all of this, i haven’t given up on technology.  it seems to me that there’s too much potential, too much good if channeled properly.  in the last few weeks i’ve had some cool opportunities to use web 2.0 to my advantage…

what i want to be when i grow up…

for more music i enjoy, check out my life & times page…

music with meaning

Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” broke headlines this year with their outside the box way of delivering music sans brick & mortar shops & normal fees by making their album available online for whatever donation fans decided they wanted to contribute.  though not the first band to distribute albums on a donation only basis, they were the biggest (that i know of), and thus it brought quite a bit more press, particularly in light of the supposed demise of the record industry classic ways of distributing music.  

just the other day i received an email from MAE, a band that for a time was near the top of my favorite bands list. their release “the everglow” was, in my simple mind, groundbreaking for it’s use of album art, song flow, and overall experience to create more than just a collection of songs.  unfortunately i felt that their last album was a significant departure from this creativity and thoughtfulness.  but i’d never bothered to leave their mailing list, so every so often i get updates & usually dump them.  

however, this one caught my eye…

churchtechcamp

the church faces a seemingly endless series of challenges with each year it progresses.  new contexts & cultural shifts.  challenges to authority and tradition.  reinterpretation of doctrine and scripture.  and the list could go on.  oftentimes, these struggles are viewed only negatively, with the result being a walled-in version of God’s people that excludes instead of includes, that pushes people & cultures out instead of welcoming them in.  many advances that our world has experienced could be complimentary to our faith, rather than destructive.  like the established religion of the time rejected the concept of a round earth or an earth that revolves around the sun, so can we get stuck in our traditions and comfort ruts, be they in science, theology, music, or even technology.

Battle Royal

The holidays are a time for many things, one of which is a great time for connecting with students.  No school = lots of free time = fun to be had.  With this in mind, a group of 8th grade boys raided the Domanion (my dubiously named house – “the domain of man”) for a Lord of the Rings mini-marathon. 

Lord of the Rings is rated PG-13 for “epic battle sequences.”  Which, interestingly enough, are the parts of the movie that most held the guys attention.  We quickly coined a few terms…everything amazing became a “battle royale” (royal being pronounced “roy-elle”, as opposed to “royl”)and everyone amazing became “so & so is totally hard-core.”  In between the on-screen battle royals the guys created a few battle royals of their own, with spilled glasses of lemonade being the only casualty.

I called it a mini-marathon because we didn’t make it all the way through.  We decided to go for the extended versions, which chart out at 3:30 (Fellowship of the Ring), 3:45 (Two Towers), and 4:10 (Return of the King).  Our gathering started a bit later than we’d planned & was interrupted by a few spontaneous games of foosball, so we charged our way through about half of the series listed above, clocking out a bit over half-way through Two Towers when parents started showing up.

Emerging…

the Reverend Doctor contest round 1 (see tab above)…use this creatively in a presentation of some sort:

Batman: In the Light of Day

a couple of my students from the Chapel wanted to make a movie this summer (one of them, Brad, is awesome at editing/directing) so this is the final product…

my debut as the Joker…

by the way…this is actually a sequel to the original one they made a year ago called “Batman and Vanilla Face”…some of the jokes may make more sense with context clues from it. Then again, they might not : ) Either way, here’s the link.