Archives for December 2013

Jane, Stop This Crazy Thing! The End of Progress and the Beginning of a Third Way

At times I feel like George Jetson rotating round and round on my treadmill outside the Skypad apartments. I want to scream, “Jane, stop this crazy thing!” I have this gut feeling that something is very, very wrong with the world. I am not just referring to the problem of evil or what theologians call original […]

Reading List: Best of 2013

  For our reading list this week, here’s a look back on our 10 most popular posts in 2013. We’ve got articles on praise teams, Christian hacking, microphones, Radical Orthodoxy, Youtube and more. Enjoy! 10. Of Mics and Men: An Argument Against Microphones in the Liturgy By Brantly Millegan 9. The Technological Return to the Family: […]

The Digital Story of the Nativity

  Merry Christmas to you and your family from all of us here at Second Nature! Here’s a fun video on how the story of the Nativity might have happened in the age of social media:

Snowden: The Mission’s Already Accomplished

While it’s common to see news articles, TV shows, pundits, editorials, blogs, tweets and books discussing what limits we should or should not put on technology, Edward Snowden is one our few public figures who saw what was going on internally at the NSA and decided that our technological progress needed limits. Contrary to those […]

Reading List: The Documented Life, the Internet of Things and the Cult of Productivity

  As Christmas approaches this week, we hope you’ll be able to tear yourself away from your job to spend time with your family, take some selfies, set some good new year’s resolutions to be more productive, and read on about why you should take less selfies, care less about productivity and get ready for […]

Getting the Gutenberg Bible Online

In 2012, the Vatican and the University of Oxford began a partnership to digitize over 1.5 million pages of biblical and medieval texts. The Polonsky Foundation, the group funding the digitization, recently released more details on the goals and scope of the project. The focus of the project will be three main groups of texts: […]

Drones: Deliver Us From Evil?

Until Sunday a week ago, drones had a pretty poor reputation. Evoking dark visions of “death from above,” they were seen as killing machines, armed with bombs and bullets, guided by the hands of remote pilots seated comfortably at a military base with a joystick and a video-game-like console. Even the term, “drone,” connotes a […]

Reading List: December 16

  Here’s what we picked as our top reads from around the web this week. What were your favorites? 2013: The Year ‘the Stream’ Crested – The Atlantic “The Stream has been the organizing metaphor for the web for the past several years. In May 2009, a high-ranking editor of TechCrunch identified and summarized this grand […]

Rushkoff: What Happens When Everything Happens Now?

  Douglas Rushkoff gives an engaging 15 minute synopsis of his newest book, Present Shock. Starting with reality TV, he discusses how media influence our experience of time and form the building blocks of our economy. He touches on venture capitalism, medieval feudalism, the Real Housewives of Orange County, the NYSE and more.

Reading List: December 8

Looking for some good reads on a Sunday afternoon? We’ve got the goods for you: Here’s how The Post covered the ‘grand social experiment’ of the Internet in 1988 – Washington Post “As a cub reporter at The Washington Post, Barton Gellman was assigned to cover an obscure but rapidly growing computer network called the […]

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