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Compassion is an eraser that removes labels and classifications. Use it thriftlessly...
Friday, March 11, 2011
The Blind Man Who Taught Himself To See
by Michael Finkel
Men's Journal
Men's Journal
Daniel Kish has been sightless since he was a year old. Yet he can mountain bike. And navigate the wilderness alone. And recognize a building as far away as 1,000 feet. How? The same way bats can see in the dark.
"The first thing Daniel Kish does, when I pull up to his tidy gray bungalow in Long Beach, California, is make fun of my driving. “You’re going to leave it that far from the curb?” he asks. He’s standing on his stoop, a good 10 paces from my car. I glance behind me as I walk up to him. I am, indeed, parked about a foot and a half from the curb.
The second thing Kish does, in his living room a few minutes later, is remove his prosthetic eyeballs. He does this casually, like a person taking off a smudged pair of glasses. The prosthetics are thin convex shells, made of acrylic plastic, with light brown irises. A couple of times a day they need to be cleaned. “They get gummy,” he explains. Behind them is mostly scar tissue. He wipes them gently with a white cloth and places them back in."
A Letter to Christian Songwriters
By Jeremy Myers
"Dear Christian Songwriter,
I would like to ask you to stop writing songs. It is clear that most of you have not experienced the pain and tragedy of life, and until you do, your songs are empty and void of meaning. Sure, you can put together a nice melody which causes people to hug and sway, but is this really what you want to accomplish through your music? If so, then ignore the rest of this letter.
But if you want your music to actually connect with people–including men–I have a few suggestions.
First, Jesus is not my girlfriend. Jesus and I are friends, but as a man, I don’t really want to be in his arms, feel his breath on my cheek, or lay my head on his chest. These songs make me shiver. And not in a good way. I don’t want to hold his hand, sit on his lap, or kiss him. What’s next? A lap dance for Jesus?"
Labels:
Links,
Music,
Religion,
Spirituality
Jesus Wants us to use Common Sense
by Donald Miller
"I remember reading a big report from a church I used to go to, a vision statement outlining the plan for the church to grow. It involved buying new property and building a new building and more than quadrupling the size of the congregation over the next twenty years or so. When I read it, I remember thinking that the vision lacked common sense. The church was in a rural area, and there was no growth happening in the community. It seemed like, if you wanted to reach more people, you’d just send another pastor into an area closer to town and plant another church. It would be a lot cheaper to do it that way anyway. But the vision was couched in a lot of God talk, a lot of talk about how it was “bathed in prayer” and the sort of language that creeps normal people out. That vision statement came out ten years ago, and very little has happened, save a church split and a lot of controversy.
I find it suspect when a vision for power and glory for man is couched in a lot of religious talk."
Labels:
Links,
Religion,
Spirituality
The Power of Partnerships
By DAVID BORNSTEIN
David Bornstein is the author of “How to Change the World,” which has been published in 20 languages, and “The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank,” and is co-author of “Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know.” He is the founder of dowser.org, a media site that reports on social innovation.
David Bornstein is the author of “How to Change the World,” which has been published in 20 languages, and “The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank,” and is co-author of “Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know.” He is the founder of dowser.org, a media site that reports on social innovation.
"Some problems are simply too complex to solve with any single approach. Consider the fact that in the United States, a million students drop out of high school each year. To begin to turn back that trend, we need to work on several fronts — assist vulnerable families when children are infants, improve classrooms from preschool through high school, provide after-school supports and college access assistance, tackle the issue of summer-learning loss and get much smarter about addressing students’ social and emotional needs at every stage. In the words of Clay Shirky: “Nothing will work, but everything might.”
But doing “everything” in piecemeal fashion won’t work. We need not only to do all of these things better than we have in the past; we need to link them in smarter and more effective ways.
In Tuesday’s column, I wrote about an effort in the social sector that is gaining momentum called “collective impact,” a disciplined effort to bring together dozens or even hundreds of organizations in a city (or field) to establish a common vision, adopt a shared set of measurable goals and pursue evidence-based actions that reinforce one another’s work and further those goals."
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