Links to Your World, Tuesday December 22

“I give up. Rather than fighting to keep my Facebook profile private, I plan to open it up to the public – removing the fiction of intimacy and friendship. But I will also remove the vestiges of my private life from Facebook and make sure I never post anything that I wouldn't want my parents, employer, next-door neighbor or future employer to see. You'd be smart to do the same. We'll need to treat this increasingly public version of Facebook with the same hard-headedness that we treat Twitter: as a place to broadcast, but not a place for vulnerability. A place to carefully calibrate, sanitize and bowdlerize our words for every possible audience, now and forever. Not a place for intimacy with friends.” (Julia Angwin at WSJ)


Interesting: I still don’t know whether to consider yoga as a secular exercise program or a wedge for the Hindu worldview to enter. But now that some yoga classes may be taxed, their organizers are saying yoga is a religious activity and thus should not be taxed. Hmm….


College Student Stops Kissing Dating Good-bye.


How to live happily on 75% less.


Mona Lisa, recreated with 3,604 cups of coffee and 564 pints of milk. Story and more pics. (HT: Maedel Hearn):



“While Muslim leaders criticized the Nov. 29 vote in Switzerland that banned construction of minarets, the distinctive spires on mosques that are used for the call to prayer, they don’t support Christians who want to build churches in some Islamic countries.” (Kudos to Daniel Williams and the NYT for this piece.)


Related: Read “Worship at Your Own Risk,” the story on the new Pew Forum revealing that 64 of the 198 nations studied -- about one-third of the countries in the world -- have “high or very high restrictions on religion.”


“Ibrahim* wasn’t ready to die. He wasn’t ready to back down either. For months, Islamic authorities had ignored the tiny house church he started with a handful of former Muslims in a dusty, desolate village on the outskirts of town. But the 26-year-old Arab farmer’s brazen evangelism had become a problem. The church was growing, and it was now turning too many heads and winning too many souls for authorities to overlook. Today, they’d come to end it.” (complete the story here)


Evangelicals who are winning minds, not just hearts.


Proof that it’s never too late to make your mark: Read about Carmen Herrera at the NYT: “At 94, She’s the Hot New Thing in Painting.”


“Queer or straight here, there's no hate here.” That’s the pastor’s weekly welcome at the worship service of Highlands Church in Denver. Weekly welcome. As in, “We’re defining ourselves by this single issue.” The AP bills the church as “evangelical” as a way to highlight that evangelicals are becoming more open to non-celibate homosexuality. Um, simply calling a church “evangelical” doesn’t make it so, and I can’t find anything in the story that indicates the church still bears the marks of an evangelical church: e.g., exclusive salvation in Jesus, the need to communicate this to others so they can benefit from it, the authority of the Bible as the infallible word of God. Perhaps they do, but it's not sufficient just to label the church "evangelical" and then hold it up as a sign that "evangelicals" are opening up to non-celibate homosexuality.


A majority of Americans have told pollsters their country is on the wrong track. Peggy Noonan says its more than the economy; she calls it “the Adam Lambert Problem.”


Some Christmas stories for your week:

10 ways to cope with loss during a season of celebration

USA Today: Hospice Santa volunteers face grief, kids' hard questions. Sweet story; sweet pics.

Read about the Advent Conspiracy, which started in Houston and now has over 5,000 churches participating nation-wide. It’s a four-pronged approach to redeeming Christmas from the malls: “Worship fully, not just a quick trip to an overcrowded sanctuary on Christmas Eve. Spend less, not avoiding gift-giving but rolling back the extent of it. Give more, both of your time and your resources to help others. And love all, with a special consideration for those in the humblest of circumstances.”

Read “Merry Jewish Christmas” and think about whether Christmas celebration in the West (and America in general) has lost even the loosest connection to the birth of the Messiah.