Why I’m Deleting Twitter and Instagram From my iPhone
According to my iOS Screen Time reports I spend an average of 27 minutes per day on Twitter and 22 minutes on Instagram. That’s 49 minutes of social media scrolling that honestly does not add much, if anything, to my day-to-day life.
Yep, that sounds about right.
The Effects of Digital and Skim Reading
Maryanne Wolf, writing for The Guardian:
Look around on your next plane trip. The iPad is the new pacifier for babies and toddlers. Younger school-aged children read stories on smartphones; older boys don’t read at all, but hunch over video games. Parents and other passengers read on Kindles or skim a flotilla of email and news feeds. Unbeknownst to most of us, an invisible, game-changing transformation links everyone in this picture: the neuronal circuit that underlies the brain’s ability to read is subtly, rapidly changing - a change with implications for everyone from the pre-reading toddler to the expert adult.
Read this entire article—and don’t skim.
As I see more and more Christians carrying only the Bible on their phones, I’m especially concerned about how all this is impacting our ability to read Scripture well.
Poverty, Abortion, and the Culture War
Matthew Loftus, writing for Mere Orthodoxy, in response to Freedom Road’s recent statement calling for Evangelical women to “hit pause” on the culture war:
I am wholly in favor of ensuring that everyone in the world has access to quality healthcare; I have spent my short career working towards this goal and writing about why this is a moral imperative for the state. I subscribe to many similar ideas about the crucial importance of poverty reduction. Yet I cannot accept the canard that other legal interventions against abortion can somehow be rendered unnecessary by reducing poverty, and it is a failure of both imagination and courage to suggest otherwise. Poverty and abortion are both the natural outworkings of evil systems that exploit and abuse human beings made in the image of God; simply replacing Anthony Kennedy with another justice like him will only keep the status quo of culture war where it is now and fail to transform the Christian political imagination as it needs to be transformed. Let us fast, pray, and listen, yes—but let us not accept a lesser solution.
I appreciate Loftus’s unwavering desire to protect the lives of the unborn, while making both left and right-leaning Christians uncomfortable in the process. The above quote serves as a summary, but the entire post is worth a read.
The System - Special Edition Retro 1951 Tornado
“The System” pen features a matte black barrel with a representation of the planets, each one with either their unique color or features, orbiting the sun on glow in the dark rings.
Accenting the barrel are gloss black “dark matter” stripes for added texture and mystery…
To finish it off, the finial of the pen is adorned with an orange disc representing the sun which adds a nice pop of bright color over the pen’s overall dark features.
This is a good looking Retro 51. And it sold out fast!
10 Things You Should Know about what Happened on Easter Sunday Morning
There has been considerable controversy over the differences between Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and their respective descriptions of what happened on Easter Sunday morning. But the differences are not discrepancies. In other words, all four accounts, in my opinion, are complementary and perfectly compatible with one another. When we compare and align the four gospel accounts we derive the following ten truths.
The Power of The Inbox
But, without regular cleaning, the Inbox loses vitality. It becomes something we can no longer trust to hold our ideas until they’d be useful. Thoughts grow stale, irrelevant, or get lost when they could have been useful.
Too often, we can let the inbox go, particularly when we are first learning systems of work. We haven’t yet formed that internal sense of its power and how delicately it rides on our care of it. But when we do have this habit of clearing well practiced, we can better feel its power.
On the one hand, this is so obvious. On the other hand, it’s so easy to miss. I’m often guilty of allowing my OmniFocus Inbox to grow stale. This undermines its usefulness and power, leaving me without a safe and trusted place to clear my head and capture tasks. And without a safe and trusted Inbox, I’m much more likely to drop the ball somewhere.
Looks like it’s time to go process my Inbox.