How the Christian Media Industry Made “Bible” into a Category Instead of a Proper Name

Tonight, after dinner, baths, and a lot of screaming, my wife and I will settle down next to our toddlers and attempt to inculcate them into the Christian mythos telling them the stories of Abraham, Rahab, Paul, Silas, and the rest. Sometimes we read from our own leather-bound Bibles, but most nights we use books […]

Three Urban Psalms

Urban Psalm 23 The Lord is my mentor—I want him to teach. He tells me to lie down with headphones unplugged. He leads me into anonymous streets. He eats when I eat. Even though I walk the hardened streets, I have no fear. I don’t even carry a rod for comfort. He likes my cap, […]

Perspectives on Privacy and Human Flourishing

I’ve not been able to track down the source, but somewhere Marshall McLuhan wrote, “Publication is a self-invasion of privacy. The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.” The unfolding NSA scandal has brought privacy front and center. A great deal is being written right now about the ideal […]

Reading List: Facebook’s Paper and Other Updates

If you missed it on your Facebook feed this past week, Facebook turned ten and released a new app, Paper. Unlike real paper you can’t write on it, burn it, or make compost with it, but there has been a lot of ink shed surrounding its release. The best piece I’ve read so far about […]

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: […]

Please Turn in Your iPads to John Chapter 1…

Perhaps one of the upsides of iPads and other tablets being incorporated into Christian worship services is that it draws attention to the details of worship services that are often overlooked. For centuries, Christians have taken for granted that a worship service will include some sort of reading or reference from the Bible–in the form […]

Support Second Nature

If you find value in the work we do at Second Nature, please consider making a modest donation. Every donation, no matter how small, is a huge encouragement to us in our work.