How have millions of American Christians come to measure spiritual progress in terms of their financial status and physical well-being? How has the movement variously called Word of Faith, Health and Wealth, Name It and Claim It, or simply prosperity gospel come to dominate much of our contemporary religious landscape? Kate Bowler's Blessed is the first book to fully explore the origins, unifying themes, and major figures of a burgeoning movement that now claims millions of followers in America. Bowler traces the roots of the prosperity gospel: from the touring mesmerists, metaphysical sages, pentecostal healers, business oracles, and princely prophets of the early 20th century; through mid-century positive thinkers like Norman Vincent Peale and revivalists like Oral Roberts and Kenneth Hagin; to today's hugely successful prosperity preachers. Bowler focuses on such contemporary figures as Creflo Dollar, pastor of Atlanta's 30,000-member World Changers Church International; Joel Osteen, known as "the smiling preacher," with a weekly audience of seven million; T. D. Jakes, named by Time magazine one of America's most influential new religious leaders; Joyce Meyer, evangelist and women's empowerment guru; and many others. At almost any moment, day or night, the American public can tune in to these preachers-on TV, radio, podcasts, and in their megachurches-to hear the message that God desires to bless them with wealth and health. Bowler offers an interpretive framework for scholars and general readers alike to understand the diverse expressions of Christian abundance as a cohesive movement bound by shared understandings and common goals.
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A revolutionary new history of humankind through the prism of work by leading anthropologist James Suzman
Work defines who we are. It determines our status, and dictates how, where, and with whom we spend most of our time. It mediates our self-worth and molds our values. But are we hard-wired to work as hard as we do? Did our Stone Age ancestors also live to work and work to live? And what might a world where work plays a far less important role look like?
Jeremy Cherfas (jeremycherfas.net)Almost a week ago, I noted a blog post by Ana Ulin: Adding Structured Book Data to My Blog Posts. Ana added a section to the front matter of her book posts that contains information about the book in question, including her rating. She was kind enough to share ...
This is exactly the sort of thing that makes me happy about the IndieWeb!
One person tinkers around with an idea and posts about how they did it. Someone else sees it and thinks it’s cool and wants it for themselves. They then modify it for their system, maybe with some changes or even improvements, and post the details on their site.
They’ve both syndicated copies to IndieWeb news or to the IndieWeb wiki, so that in the future, others looking for that sort of UI research or examples can find them and potentially modify them for their own personal use.
And the cycle begins anew…
Do you need big, feature-packed, and sometimes complex tool for your work, to stay organized, or keep track of your tasks?
Maybe not.
Maybe all you need is plain text. Yes, simple, old fashioned, unadorned, boring text. It sounds scary or alien, but it's not.
Plain text isn't just for the geek or the techie. Plain text isn't just for the academic or hardcore productivity hacker. Plain text is for anyone.
How I do things in this space might not be to liking of some plain text purists. That’s OK. I can’t please everyone. And I’m not going to try.
Helped a customer ship some books to a person in prison & I don’t know if folks who don’t work in bookstores/don’t have incarcerated friends/family are familiar with how difficult prisons make this process. So for Independent Bookstore Day, let’s walk through it.
— liz (@eafreem) August 29, 2020
I’m back on the quantified self train. I have tried quantified self a number of times in the past but it has never stuck. More recently, I’ve become interested in quantified self because it gives me a lot of data with which I can experiment. While each individual metric may not be useful on its own, over time I will be able to collect a lot of data about myself.
I am unsure whether I’ll keep at quantified self but this time, for some reason, I am more hopeful. I’ve started to play around with quantified self metrics on this site and it has brought me a lot of joy. Even if the statistics just sit on this site, at least I’ll know that it was fun playing around with them.
Felix Pleşoianu (Felix Rambles)At the end of June, I subscribed to micro.blog with some amount of hope. Nine weeks later, I canceled my account. Yeah, isn't that public timeline gorgeous? All pretty photos and thoughtful posts. Surprise! It's heavily curated. To the point of being suffocating in fact. You'll never going to see th...
Wow! I feel like Felix somehow missed and misunderstands a lot of the value of micro.blog and how it really works. Perhaps they haven’t read the documentation or explored it enough?
This reads like Felix thinks the discover feed is the entire point of the platform and not simply a tangential discovery mechanism for new users. It feels like they didn’t realize they could subscribe to anyone they wanted and that feed is the one that most people find more valuable and use regularly.
It also reads like they weren’t getting any interaction at all in terms of replies/comments. Not sure if they had a paid account (and were just using micro.blog) or if they’re using their own site and just don’t have webmentions which means they have to manually go to find interactions.
On the other hand, micro.blog is doing a tremendous amount compared to simple silos like Twitter, Facebook, and Mastodon, so I’m not surprised that some people can misconstrue what is going on or even why. A lot of how you use it depends on what resources you have when you come to it. If anything though, micro.blog is the last thing out there that’s a walled garden in the social space.
Felix Pleşoianu (Felix Rambles)Let's make one thing clear: if you can afford to have even one internet domain to your name, let alone more, you're incredibly privileged. You have the money to pay for it, your country isn't subject to some embargo, and no government has decided to silence you. Yet. Because you don't own any domain...
Not sure I agree with the entirety of the argument here. Yes there is some privilege at play and there’s the eternal argument over ownership versus renting, but in the long span of history, we’re making some exceptional strides. Compare domain ownership and hosting to the cost of having a phone number and cell phone service. I get far more value out of my self-hosted website.
When copying a chunk of text that contains rich text formatting and pasting into most apps, the rich text formatting is preserved. When pasting the same chunk into Obsidian, the rich text formatting seems to be converted into HTML tags by default. Because Obsidian uses markdown, I think it would be more useful to have it converted to markdown by default (or at least given the option). If that’s not clear, then I hope the following is helpful. When pasting text into Google Docs, Text Edit, etc....
fluffy (beesbuzz.biz)Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of criticism about the IndieWeb movement based on the notion that everything that comes out of it is biased towards people with technology privilege; that it’s all well and good for people who know how to run a website to build their own thing, but that the vast majority of the Internet is made up of people who’d have nowhere to begin. And that it follows that the IndieWeb movement is inherently flawed.
Great piece; highly recommend. I always appreciate fluffy’s perspective.
Lectue 9: Temporal Discounting—Now or Later?
Now consider a fundamental challenge in decisions involving time: temporal discounting, or the human tendency to view rewards as worth less in the future than they are in the present. Study real-life examples of this phenomenon, three explanations for why it occurs, and key approaches to making better time-related decisions.
Finished lecture 9. This is a pretty dense lecture, I’ll circle back around on it at least one more time for notes.
The recent scandal at her talk show suggests that the host’s smiling facade covers up something dark—and hints at why that facade had to be created in the first place.
Operating systems, elitism, and everything (okay, only a few other things).
Tracy Durnell (Cascadia Inspired)There are lots of things to be excited about in joining the Indie Web, like supporting a more human-centered version of the web and connecting better with others across the web. Joining the Indie Web involves a few steps to … Continue reading →
Could I also use Indie Web tools for a persona, or is that not in keeping with the community? ❧
The community is all about websites and identity, so having a website for a pen name is exactly the sort of thing you should definitely do! I’m sure there are a few who have done it, but I’m unaware of any documenting it yet. Starting a stub page on the wiki for pen name could be a good start if you do.
Annotated on August 27, 2020 at 03:25PM
I haven’t committed to the philosophy of completely owning all the data I post online. I feel like this is something else I can take step by step, getting used to the change as I go. ❧
This can be a daunting task. I often ask people “How do you eat an entire whale?”
The only plausible answer is “One bite at a time”, so I suggest you do the same thing with your social media presences and other data. One step at a time.
Annotated on August 27, 2020 at 03:28PM
As someone who writes social media for work, I am deeply rooted in the practice of writing a unique intro when I share a post to Twitter, not directly syndicating it with whatever text I started the article with. For me that feels good enough (not saving that unique share to my site) since including the link means any likes and comments about the article come back to my blog thanks to Bridgy, but maybe someone will convince me otherwise 😉 ❧
I’ll often share articles to Twitter and don’t necessarily do a 1-to-1 match of the syndicated copy on Twitter. Usually I’ll excerpt a piece that ends up appearing on Twitter with a link back to the article. I generally presuppose that if they’re interested, they’ll click through and read otherwise they’re bookmarking it or sharing the link with others, so those interactions coming back to the original are always fine with me.
Annotated on August 27, 2020 at 03:30PM