Reading the text of my blog itself is not really the interesting part. The exciting part is how the Internet allows me to be the eyes and ears for the people sending me postings from Africa.
By the last decades of the 21st century, church worship will still take the form of reading passages of traditional texts - the Bible, the Koran, the Rig Veda - but physicist-priests will preside over the ceremonies.
If there's ever a place where you can't argue that you can put the facts over here and the text over there and see if they fit, it is surely in anthropology.
I do tend to be an analyzer. I'm an old English major from way back, so I do have fun tearing apart texts and trying to find the hidden secrets and the subtexts in there.
It all comes down to that one person you always think about before you fall asleep at night. And text "Good Morning" as soon as you wake up.
I don't think I've ever sent a text to Gordon Brown because I'm confident that he would absolutely have no idea how to receive it. He barely managed to master WordPerfect 4.1.
Don't see the point in reading ghost-written autobiographies, even though some of these published lives may fascinate me. The 'ghost' is always present, manipulating an interview into first-person singular text, and it feels like I'm reading a lie.
I plan someday to do a one-man show based solely on the e-mails of Bellamy Young. And people will think I've written a brilliant comedy myself when, in fact, all the text will be directly from Bellamy.
Preaching a series allows you to go into greater depth in the text, and spending several weeks on one theme allows the teaching to be absorbed more thoroughly.
The biblical texts that we Christians have used for centuries to justify our hostility toward the Jews need to be banished forever from the sacred writings of the Christian church.
'Just looking at pictures' used to be considered cheating. No longer. The graphic novel is booming. Comics, heavily illustrated texts, books with no words are now accepted as reading.
The views of the European Union are fully reflected in this text, particularly the key objective of the EU, namely vigorously to address the disarmament of Iraq and to do so within the framework of the UN Security Council.
Not taking the Bible (or other texts based on 'revealed truths') literally leaves it up to the reader to cherry-pick elements for belief. There exists no guide for such cherry-picking, and zero religious sanction for it.
Text messaging is just the most recent focus of people's anxiety; what people are really worried about is a new generation gaining control of what they see as their language.
The highest view of the Scriptures is not the one that seeks to make an idol of the Bible (biblicism), but the one that allows the biblical text to exalt Christ as the living Word over all creation. The Word became flesh, not ink.
I do, in fact, have a book club. I meet with a couple of guys once a month of a lunchtime discussion of some interesting text, usually, but not always, philosophical.
I find my characters and stories in many varied places; sometimes they pop out of newspaper articles, obscure historical texts, lively dinner party conversations and some even crawl out of the dusty remote recesses of my imagination.
I have no problem selling books to media franchises and we do it all the time. The author must understand that he/she is a writer for hire and has no control over copyright or over editorial changes made to the text.
Phil Wenneck: [his answering machine message] Hey, this is Phil. Leave me a message, or don't, but do me a favor: don't text me, it's gay.
I'm equally guilty of using technology - I Twitter, I text people, I chat. But I think there's something strangely insidious about it that it makes us think we're closer when in fact we're not seeing each other, we're not connecting.
Under the deluge of minute-to-minute text conversations, emails, relentless exchange of media channels and passwords and apps and reminders and tweets and tags, we lose sight of what all this fuss is supposed to be about in the first place: ourselves...
