Text Messages

…and all that. But, um, this isn’t fair: Not only is it gorgeous, but the hardware updates are impressive. The trackpad is glass, and does double duty as the mouse button. The shell is one piece of aluminum, and it and its contents were apparently made to be recyclable. The graphics performance is 5x faster. 

I still consider Text Message to be in beta form, and it’s a good thing, aye? Please forgive the blue background, odd layout, and any other oddities you see here in the coming days. We’ve just launched a rebuild and redesign of Beliefnet, and our blogs are having a hard time talking to the new…

Must reading: Today’s Times has a report on the persecution of Christians in India. The photo above shows Christian refugees praying at a camp in Bhubaneshwar. It’s harrowing, harrowing stuff. An excerpt below, followed by a prayer. God help them:  A few steps from where the nun had been attacked in Nuagaon, five men, their heads freshly…

Mark Bittman–author of the most essential cookbook ever (I open it just about every single week)–offers cautious hope about the state of our food culture in this weekend’s NY Times Magazine:  [F]ood continues to be fetishized; organic food has been commodified; the federal government subsidizes almost all of the wrong kinds of food production; supermarkets peddle…

For Sunday morning – A San Francisco Chronicle reader finds a prophecy about the struggling 49ers: Editor – I was doing my daily Bible reading – yes, even in San Francisco some people do this – when I came across old Jeremiah’s 2,500-year-old insight into the performance of the Niners again this week: “What are…

One of the most unshakeable reading experiences I’ve had in the last year is Don Lattin’s Jesus Freak: A True Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edge. Taking a cue from Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven, Lattin uses the story of a freakish murder-suicide as the occasion to research the nature…

Brandon Fibbs, a longtime Colorado Springs resident, political junkie, movie reviewer for Christianity Today, and current DC resident, reads Timothy Egan’s recent blog post on cultural and political shifts in Colorado Springs and adds some observations of his own: I recently spoke with a friend who is a longtime member of the Colorado Springs press.…

Last year, a Swedish ad man named Dag Soderberg published a Bible made in the image of Vogue magazine. Called Bible Illuminated: The Book, it featured glossy images of models and artistic contemporary photography, and it caused quite a stir–Sweden saw a 50% rise in Bible sales during 2007.   Now, a New Testament version is…

Cameron Strang, the publisher of Relevant Magazine and the subject of much discussion this summer when he first accepted, then declined an invitation to pray at the Democratic National Convention, posted an informal poll question in his Facebook and Twitter statuses yesterday: “I’m curious, Facebook and Twitter friends: God is the creator, but do you…

  The latest YouTube video from the always delightful, always informative Reel Geezers offers a brief history of Hollywood’s political films, focusing mostly on movies about the electoral process. They cover some of my own favorites–Born Yesterday, The Candidate–and also meander into movies whose politics are meta, such as “It’s a Wonderful Life,” a movie…

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