the tindog coffeehouse

I’m blogging my way through From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer. Dyer began the book by trying to put technology in its proper perspective. Technology, he argues, isn’t neutral. As it changes over time, we change with it. What we view as new and futuristic today becomes normal (or “mythic”) to future generations, to the point where we no longer even think of it as technology.

Imagination.

In Chapter 2, he builds upon this point by looking at exactly what technology is, defining it in terms of a narrative:

Though we might not realize it, we compose these mininarratives whenever we encounter even the simplest gadget. If we happen to see a shovel, our minds can easily imagine the act of digging a hole, visualizing how the ground will look after we’re finished. This small effort of the imagination has a clear movement from beginning (the world before the shovel) to middle (the act of digging) to end (the world with a new hole)—the basic arc of any story. …

Technology, then, is the bridge from this world to the imagined one.

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I recently started reading From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer. I’m only a chapter in, but I’m already intrigued by the premise and am eager to see where Dyer goes from here. As a Christian who has worked in the IT field for over ten years (and who has a History degree), I’m fascinated with the whole subject of the role of technology in the world and how it affects the Church.

I wasn’t intending to write a blog post about the first chapter. Maybe a post or two after I had finished the book. But apparently a lot of folks are blogging their way through it. (ChurchMag has a great chapter-by-chapter review with links to others’ blogs in the comments.) So I figured I would offer a few comments of my own. I should mention that at the moment I’m fighting a cold and am juiced up on tons of cold medicine, so this post will be brief (and probably nonsensical).

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Hi and welcome to the newly relaunched blog! Which just happens to look exactly like it did a couple of days ago. Except that it’s now on a different server.

I decided to move to a new web hosting company after my old one kept going down. Every day. Multiple times a day. Now granted, I don’t get a lot of traffic here, and most likely no one but me noticed the outages, but it really ticked me off. I mean, if I’m gonna pay for a service, I kinda expect it to work. That’s not too much to ask is it?

So everything’s been moved over, and as far as I can tell, it seems to be working fine. There may be a few kinks that still need to be ironed out, but I think we’re good for the most part. The new host seems to be a lot faster, too, which is nice.

It’s hard to believe I’ve had this blog for almost four years. And actually, I’ve had the domain since 1998. The first iteration of tindog.com was a really bad personal home page built with FrontPage 98. How bad was it? Well, the fact that it was built with FrontPage should give you a clue. And I think I used Comic Sans for the font. And there might’ve been a picture of Mao Tse-Tung on it (for some unknown reason).

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Robert Jeffress, the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas, generated quite the firestorm last week when he declared Mormonism to be a cult. Speaking at the Value Voters Summit, he said, “I think Mitt Romney’s a good, moral man, but those of us who are born again followers of Christ should prefer a competent Christian. Rick Perry’s a Christian. He’s an evangelical Christian, a follower of Jesus Christ. Mormonism is not Christianity. It has always been considered a cult by the mainstream of Christianity.”

Naturally, the media jumped on his comments, happily characterizing him as some backwoods Bible-thumper. A lot of Christian churches backpedaled, not willing to condemn the LDS Church. And Rick Perry himself, whom Jeffress had endorsed, quickly distanced himself from the pastor. When asked if Mormonism was a cult, Perry said without hesitation, “No.”

But the fact of the matter is, Dr. Jeffress is exactly right.

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I grew up in Lubbock, Texas, home of Buddy Holly, cotton, and endless miles of flat dirt. Which means I also grew up as a Texas Tech fan. Some of my fondest childhood memories are of going to the Tech games with my grandparents. My Papa would always wear his red and black cowboy boots, and I’d cross my fingers and hope the Saddle Tramps would throw a little red football my way. Then when it got cold, we’d huddle under a blanket and drink hot chocolate out of a Thermos and ooh and ahh over the Goin’ Band from Raiderland. On a field trip once, we got to run out onto the field at Jones Stadium, and it was like a dream come true.

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