I also told her I thought it was a gift to be forced to choose your priorities, because there is no way in hell you can do everything. When teaching I saw what over-commitment did to the kids, and it wasn’t good. So, whether you just realize you’ve slowed down or you have Fight-Club-like epiphany in oncoming traffic or you find out suddenly find out that you’re going to die, the choice-making will be foisted on you. Yes, even you, numerous and belligerent Gen Y, eventually, and you’ll find out it’s not as easy as you think.We’re tired, but still hustling; Austin is a haven for Gen-Xers figuring out what they really care about, which I guess is why I ended up here. Everybody has a side hustle, and that’s the beauty of this town, but the real question is how long you can keep up five different side hustles while dealing with hours and hours of real life obligations. Something’s gotta give, eventually. Until it does, we’ll keep on keepin’ on. But we’ll be singing a new anthem, which will probably be “I’m So Tired.”
We’re not the only church called Mars Hill, and occasionally there arises confusion between us and other churches that share the “Mars Hill” name, particularly as we now have our churches in four states. This was the case recently when one of our members called us to find out if we had planted Mars Hill churches in the Sacramento, California area. We had not, but when we went to these churches’ websites, it was obvious to us how people could be confused. Each of these three connected churches in the Sacramento region—planted in 2006, 2007, and 2010—bore the “Mars Hill” name and their logo was substantially similar to the logo we’ve used since 1996.When cases like this arise in the business world, it’s customary for a law office to send a notice asking the other organization to adjust their branding to differentiate it. This is commonly referred to as a cease and desist letter. On September 27, 2011, our legal counsel sent such a letter to these three Mars Hill churches requesting that they change their logo and name. In hindsight, we realize now that the way we went about raising our concerns, while acceptable in the business world, is not the way we should deal with fellow Christians. On Friday we spoke with the pastor of Mars Hill in Sacramento to apologize for the way we went about this. We had a very productive conversation and look forward to continuing that conversation in the days and weeks ahead.
Clarification on some rumors that have been on some blogs | The Mars Hill Blog
Good for them for apologizing and taking a different tack. But what dos it tell us about the state of contemporary megachurch Christianity that a church would (a) be so obsessed with owning its brand and (b) would think, even for a moment, that the first step one should take in dealing with apparent “brand infringement” is to call in the legal team to write a cease-and-desist letter?
Again: good for them for apologizing. It was the right thing to do. But the next step should be to ask themselves, “How did our church culture get so thoroughly captured by the standard practices of the American business world that we thought a cease-and-desist letter was a good idea?” — and then to spend a good deal of time and energy trying to come up with an answer.
I remember sitting in his back yard in his garden one day, and he started talking about God. He said, ‘Sometimes I don’t. It’s 50-50. But ever since I’ve had cancer I’ve been thinking about it more, and I find myself believing a bit more. Maybe that’s because I want to believe in an afterlife, that when you die it doesn’t just all disappear. The wisdom you’ve accumulated, somehow it just lives on.’ But then he paused for a second and he said, 'Yeah but sometimes I think it’s like an on-off switch. Click, and you’re gone,’ he said. Paused again and said, 'And that’s why I don’t put on-off switches on Apple devices.’
If you really want complete freedom of choice, complete openness of information, where nobody is spying on you, no one is selling your presence to advertisers, the only place to find it is a library, where they keep books.
Bang & Olufsen stuff is cool in its retro-futuristic way, but this is more my style. Though, alas, not my budget.
But the genuinely impressive moments in a journey through B&O’s world come from peeking at its process. You expect a company that sells incredibly expensive products to pour tremendous time, effort, skill, and craft into making them. But in an age of outsourcing and cost efficiencies, it’s still something to witness. In one of the dozen soundproof garages where B&O car stereos are fine-tuned, engineers are testing the audio in an Audi Q7 tricked out with some 50 speakers. Elsewhere, a Rube Goldberg machine burns cigarettes and shoots the smoke at TVs to make sure their screens can withstand such abuse. Best of all is the tidy Factory Five, where robots and humans mill and polish aluminum to insanely precise standards. The guide points out an enormous Swiss-made Niederberger grinding machine used to create the grain on the frame of the BeoVision 7 TV. Like everything in the factory, this assembly line was meticulously organized to turn designers’ exacting visions into reality.
When you have eliminated the impossible, as Sherlock Holmes told Watson, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. This rule holds for presidential contests as well as for whodunits: Romney is improbable, but his rivals are impossible, and so he will be the nominee.
Making his own choice of the best time to have been alive, Edward Gibbon, author of “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” (1776-89), didn’t have much doubt. “If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.” This was the second century AD, when Rome’s “five good emperors”, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, brought a peace and stability that western Europe would—in Gibbon’s view—never see again. But maybe it was an easier question then. Gibbon was white, smart and male. He could walk from the right end of one hierarchical society into another without a tremor. Nor was he sacrificing much technology to do so. Barring gunpowder and the printing press, his world and Hadrian’s were close enough to let Gibbon swap breeches for a toga and barely notice the difference. For us, the question needs a little more thought.Anyone who dislikes pain, prefers their operations under anaesthetic, and has no wish to die of smallpox, might well choose to live now. We can balance that by awarding ourselves perpetual good health, but it’s harder to level the playing field when it comes to gender.
WHAT WAS THE BEST TIME AND PLACE TO BE ALIVE? | More Intelligent Life
Award ourselves perpetual good health? Wy not award ourselves immortality while we’re at it? If you’re going to take this question at all seriously, you need to face the facts: few properly informed and properly rational persons who enjoy the benefits of modern health care and nutrition — leaving aside electronic communication and other goodies that folks can have varying opinions about — would willingly return to any time that lacked those blessings. If my family and I had lived even twenty-five years earlier than we do, my wife and I would never have been able to have a child and my wife would be dead. And many millions of people are in the same boat. If you’re going to ask “When was the best time to live?” you don’t get to just factor out essential considerations.
We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past—whether he admits it or not—can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.