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OSI Gazette » Blog Archive » What’s Wrong with our Justice System.

On Tuesday, January 27th, 2009, former AIG executive got sentenced to 4 years in prison for $500 million fraud. Source. The same day, a judge sentenced a homeless man to 15 years in prison. The homelessman had robbed a Louisiana bank and took a $100 bill; after feeling remorseful, he surrendered to police. Source.

ht: Ariah Fine

And of course, even in this story there is no picture of the AIG executive.

So, let me catch you up on what’s been seen in my life over the past week.

For those of you who want a more frequent update than I’m posting you can visit and subscribe to the feed on my Project365 Flickr Photo Page.

On to the photos. This time Lightbox works, so you should be able to click on them to enlarge.

lowbright: New day in politics, same old racist world on the silver screen.

I was speaking with Gene Yang (author of “American Born Chinese” and National Book Award nominee) about the casting and he said it best: “It’s like a white Asian fetishist’s wet dream. All the Asian culture they want, without any of the Asian people.”

J.R.R. Tolkien never specifically described his central human, and human-like, characters as being “Caucasian” or “European” (as far as I know) in “The Lord of the Rings”, but it would be pretty stupid to think they weren’t when the entire story and the world in which it was set came from an obvious extrapolation of medieval Europe. Why should it be any different for Avatar?

Click the link for an interesting post, as well as an address to which you can write to make your voice heard.

So I’ve been chastised for not posting pictures frequently enough. I’m trying to strike the balance between frequent photo posting and not turning this into a photo blog. Let me know if you think I’m posting photos too frequently, or too infrequently.

Anyway, on to the pics. This time, instead of trying to get flickr manager to play nice with lightbox, I’ve decided that these will just be plain photos with links. Click on each image to go to the flickr page and see my (incredibly brief) comments on them.

So I’ve been meaning to do a year in review post, and even though it’s almost a month into 2009, I should still talk about 2008. And, as Chris requested, I should talk about seminary.

Truth be told, I’d probably be talking about Seminary anyway, it was a pretty huge life change for me that was a very long buildup to a very rapid change. It’s a story that spans several years, so I might as well settle down to tell  you about it.

Why Seminary

The short answer is that I wanted to learn how to do ministry better.

I did my undergrad at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. Macalester is known for many things, and among those things is a culture of activism and community service. Something it is less known for is the amazing community of Christians that gather as a chapter of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship there. On the surface, this seeems like a strange statement to make seeing as during my time there Macalester became ranked as the #1 school where students ignore God. But that ranking, did not reflect the depth or strength of the Christian community there, a community I was deeply involved in.

At the same time, the community service office there had a program where one can earn the work-study part of your financial aid by working with local non-profit organizations. Through this program I worked for three out of my four years at Admission Possible (a time that deserves an entry of it’s own). It was sometime in my Junior or Senior year that I realized how important working towards making the world a better place  was to me.

Fast forward a couple of years, I’m working in a tech company that works specifically with non-profits, volunteering with InterVarsity and heavily involved in my church. One evening I was hanging out at Mac and listening to my roommate at the time talking about a particular tech problem he was trying to figure out. Now if you know my former roommate, he’s someone who is called to be a computer geek. So I listen to him and realize that while I enjoyed computers, I’ll never talk about coding the way he does. Instead I recognized that sort of passion when I talked about the small group I was leading at Macalester, or the 3rd and 4th graders I was teaching at Pilgrim.  That was the turning point that got me on the road to seminary.

I was hoping to have a content post between these Project365 posts, but oh well. Here are the most recent ones.

Also, with an updated plugin, Lightbox now works with Flickr Manager, so click on the photos and see them bigger.

I’ve been holding back on posting some of this as I try to work on the presentation. I’m halfway there, but still haven’t figured out how to combine two of my plugins. In the meantime here are some pictures. Click each image to go to its Flickr page with descriptions.

Well that’s all for now. I have some more pics lurking in my camera. I’m enjoying this a lot so far

Small African Church on a Farm by Franci Strümpfer

As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God.

I used to avoid this truth by applauding – as you can – the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It’s a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.

But this doesn’t fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.

I’ve seen this article linked in a couple of places, and I thought that I should link it here. The article doesn’t put forward any real data, mostly anecdotes, but it brings up some interesting thoughts, particularly when one considers that historically, missions/evangelism and commerce have not had a consistently mutually beneficial relationship, but many times are mutually antagonistic.  But I don’t think that the author is putting forward that there is a commercial benefit to Christian missions, but instead there is, for want of a better word, a spiritual benefit.

But those thoughts are coming from my perspective. I’d love to hear your thoughts about this article.

Photojojo » Project 365: How to Take a Photo a Day and See Your Life in a Whole New Way.

People will often say that their whole lives flashed before their eyes after they experienced a traumatic event. Perhaps it’s a bit morbid, but we think that sounds pretty incredible.

One of the things that I plan to do this year is Project365.  In a nutshell, I’m going to be taking at least one picture every day of 2009 that tells a story of that day.

I’ll be posting these pictures on this blog, and I’m going to aim for a weekly photodump, but the schedule will change if things get in the way, or if I have a particularly awesome photo I want to share.  I think it would be cool to have a photo record of every day of this year, plus it should help me regain some waning photography/storytelling skills.

Here are the photos as of Sunday night.

January 1: Finished Culture Making. It's an excellent book.

January 2: Does it count as killing if they are zombies?

January 3: This isn't some wierd blessing ceremony for my notebooks. The table with the incense was just the best table for it.

January 4: Every first Sunday of the month our sunday school department puts on a breakfast and fellowship.

Well that’s the first 4 days of the year. We’ll see how the rest of this goes. Also, there should be a post on Grad school coming up soon.

FFFFOUND! | theloniusmonksnoteshk0.jpg 600×816 pixels.

Thelonious monk gives good music and life advice.

Notes by Thelonious Monk

That last note is worth a blog post by itself