Merlin Mann, author and editor of 43folders, gave a presentation on Getting Things Done at a BayChi forum earlier this month. You can download the audio here. Mann addresses how technology has changed our world but many of us are struggling to change the way we live in order to keep up.

Do you remember the promise of email, email was going to give us untethered access...no more meetings...you don't even have to wear pants, you can be at home...So the big question is, how's your inbox today, how'd that work out... shave a lot of hours off the day, finding a lot more free time 'cause of email?...Everyone I know is comepletly screwed by email, the volume of email they get right now is a second job.

In his presentation, Mann makes some suggestions for dealing with the glut of information and communication that many of us deal with on a daily basis so that we can get the things done that we care about and spend less time and energy on the things that are just noise. The presentation is really funny and a great overview of what he is working on with 43folders.

Posted by Ryan Torma at 08:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I saw my first ever Sopranos episode last night, and it was incredible. (Yes, I know I'm a johnny come lately on this--not having cable is kind of a bummer sometimes.) Anyhow, the episode was thick with religous imagery, and had great acting and production values. Tony had been shot the previous episode and was now in some strange purgatory place and while there gets slapped on the mouth by a buddhist monk! I'm not sure what it all means yet but I'm hooked after one episode. I am going to have to wait until after finals, however, to get on the DVD marathon program.

Posted by Ryan Torma at 09:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (1)

An article ran yesterday on Yahoo News by Philip Longman examining what he calls The Liberal Baby Bust, the phenomenon that people with secular values are less likely to have children than those with more traditional values.

What's the difference between Seattle and Salt Lake City? There are many differences, of course, but here's one you might not know. In Seattle, there are nearly 45% more dogs than children. In Salt Lake City, there are nearly 19% more kids than dogs.

This curious fact might at first seem trivial, but it reflects a much broader and little-noticed demographic trend that has deep implications for the future of global culture and politics. It's not that people in a progressive city such as Seattle are so much fonder of dogs than are people in a conservative city such as Salt Lake City. It's that progressives are so much less likely to have children.

It's a pattern found throughout the world, and it augers a far more conservative future - one in which patriarchy and other traditional values make a comeback, if only by default. Childlessness and small families are increasingly the norm today among progressive secularists. As a consequence, an increasing share of all children born into the world are descended from a share of the population whose conservative values have led them to raise large families...

This correlation between secularism, individualism and low fertility portends a vast change in modern societies. In the USA, for example, nearly 20% of women born in the late 1950s are reaching the end of their reproductive lives without having children. The greatly expanded childless segment of contemporary society, whose members are drawn disproportionately from the feminist and countercultural movements of the 1960s and '70s, will leave no genetic legacy. Nor will their emotional or psychological influence on the next generation compare with that of people who did raise children.

I have seen this birthrate data in other places, but Longman makes a problematic leap in his framing of a conservative future. His presentation leaves us to believe that values are genetic, and that because of low progressive birth rates, progressive values will be bred out. However, this framework does not account for how progressive values grew out of a culture with traditional values of the early to mid part of the 20th century. There seems to be little guarantee that the many children of conservatives will share their parents' values. If values were genetic, we should expect regular worship participation in the US to rise with population growth, instead, participation has been declining over the last four decades. There will be more children of conservatives, but there might not be more conservatives.

Posted by Ryan Torma at 09:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I am so excited, I just received word that my paper proposal for the International Conference on Media, Religion, and Culture has been accepted! I'm going to be heading to Sweden this summer. Here's a section of the abstract of the paper I am going to present.

Seeking Serenity
The television series Firefly and subsequent feature film Serenity are an excellent resource for churches wishing to create spaces of dialogue and theological interaction with young adults in the United States. Regular attendance at Christian worship services in the United States has been on the decline since the 1960s with young adults being the least likely to attend. Churches are experimenting and developing new methods of engaging young adults in an effort to make their symbolic, narrative and sacramental resources more accessible to young adults in the U.S. context. One such effort includes engaging with and creating spaces for dialogue around popular forms of media.

Not only do Firefly and Serenity ask difficult questions about what it means to be human, they also pose a challenging set of questions back to communities of faith, prompting engagement with issues of sin, belief, symbol, ritual, and existentialism. This paper explores the universe created through Firefly and Serenity, and reflects upon the challenges of, and opportunities for, engaging in theological reflection within such a universe.

If you want to read more, well I guess you'll have to come to the conference. Hope to see you there.

Posted by Ryan Torma at 06:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It is dumping snow here in Minneapolis today. Traffic is terrible, and I had to knock the snow off the lialac trees today so they didn't break under the weight. Despite the mess, it is beautiful, a fresh whitewash on the city and I've been humming this Spirit Garage song all morning, the Snowfall Blues in B minor.

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I shot some promotional photos for Jonathan Rundman a while back. You can see some of the work here in the 2005-2006 gallery. Make sure to listen to his music while you are there; I am certainly a fan.

Posted by Ryan Torma at 09:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

RELIGION, MEDIA, & CULTURE

American Jesus, by Stephen Prothero
Prothero shows how American pictures of Jesus through the late 19th Century through 20th Century change and reflect cultural norms and ideals of the time and how images of the son of god have been shaped in the image of an American psyche.

Bowling Alone, by Robert Putnam
Putnam investigates why participation in fraternal organizations, churches, voting, card clubs and bowling leagues has been on the decline in the United States for decades.

Consuming Religion, by Vincent Miller
Miller examines consumer culture as it has developed in the U.S. and other Western cultures and how consumer practice affects Christian communities and practice.

Everyday Apocalypse, The Sacred Revealed in Radiohead, The Simpsons and other Pop Culture Icons, by David Dark
Eschewing hell-fire and brimstone, Dark works with more orthodox Christian definition of apocalypse that is about the presence of a future, hopeful reality within the present and then examines how several significant voices within pop culture media streams are speaking apocalyptic words of truth as non-explicitly Christian voices.

Film as Religion: Myths, Morals, and Rituals, by John Lyden
Lyden makes an argument that they ways people engage film are very similar to how they engage religious experience and therefore the conversations surrounding religion and film should be treated as inter-religious dialogue.

Finding Serenity, ed. Jane Espenson
A collection of essays on various themes in the brief but fabulous Joss Whedon television series, Firefly.

From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media, and the Supernatural, by Lynn Schofield Clark
Clark examines how teenagers are engaging popular media in order to work out questions of life, religion and the supernatural.

Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence, by Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel
A modernization and democratization theory based on the results of the World Values Survey.

Religion in the News, by Stewart M. Hoover
Hoover, a professor of Media Studies, examines how religion is covered in the news, how religion is engaged by news room staffs and how the religion in the news is received by audiences.

Religion in the Media Age, by Stewart M. Hoover
Hoover argues that as people negotiate meaning and identity, they do so through both religious and media practices, and thus religion and media shares cultural space for meaning and identity.

Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics, by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart
A secularization theory based on the results of the World Values Survey.

The Culting of Brands: When Customers Become True Believers, by Douglas Atkin
Atkin explores how consumer brands are using techniques of religious communities to attract, build and retain communities of devoted fans of a particular brand. Read my review.

The Flight of the Creative Class, by Richard Florida
This follow up to The Rise of the Creative Class, Florida examines how public policy on the local and national level is hindering and sometimes helping growth of the creative class in the United States.

The Hacker Ethic: and the Spirit of the Information Age, by Pekka Himanen, Linus Torvalds, and Manuel Castells.
An explanation of the creative ethic at work in open source software development that uses religious imagery to explain what the ethic is all about and what it is not about.

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, by Max Weber
Weber argues that the values in ascetic Protestantism of the duty to God through labor in a specific calling, the legitimacy of profit, and the rejection of world pleasures and enjoyment of wealth, provided a spiritual and moral ethos for the development of capitalism.

The Rise of the Creative Class, by Richard Florida
Florida, an economist, examines the new class of workers in the world who are paid for their creative contributions and how their patterns of life and work are affecting communities and nations.

Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts On Faith, by Anne Lamott
Lamott gives a frank and funny autobiographical look on life and faith.




PHOTOGRAPHY & VISUAL COMMUNICATION

Capture the Moment The Pulizer Prize Photographs, ed. by Cyma Rubin and Eric Newton.
This is a collection of photographs from each year that a Pulitzer Prize has been awarded beginning with the first award in 1942 through 2003. In the case of Prizes awarded to photo portfolios, not all images in the portfolio are printed in this book.

Chased By the Light, by Jim Brandenburg
Nature photographer, Jim Brandenburg takes on a 90 day journey in which he takes one photo a day for 90 days. The book prints each of the 90. All are good, many are outstanding.

China: Fifty Years Inside the People’s Republic
A photo collection that explores 5 decades of life inside China.

Eyes of Time Photojournalism in America, by Marianne Fulton
Fulton and others provide a history of photojournalism. Although published in the ‘80s it is still a helpful text.

How I Learned Not To Be A Photojournalist, by Dianne Hagaman
Hagaman explores the power dynamics and exclusionary practices embedded in Christian homeless mission organizations in this photo documentary.

Japan: A Nisei’s First Encounter, by Doug Beasley
A beautiful collection of photos of Japan wonderfully printed and bound.

Magnum Stories
A collection of photo essays by Magnum photographers.

Magnum °
A 50 year retrospective collection of the works of Magnum photographers.

On Photography, by Susan Sontag
A classic collection of essays regarding photography.

Picturing Faith, by Colleen McDannell
McDannell examines the lived faith of early 20th Century Americans as seen in the photographs of the Farm Securities Administration collection.

Regarding the Pain of Others, by Susan Sontag
Sontag presents an excellent analysis on the connection of photography and images of atrocity, violence, and suffering.

Remembering to Forget, by Barbie Zelizer
Zelizer makes a detailed analysis of how photographs were used to portray the atrocities of the Nazi Concentration Camps and how those photographs are linked to collective memory.

Reinventing Comics, by Scott McCloud
A look at how digital technologies are changing the comic industry and how those technologies might be used to expand and develop the genre. The market forces explored in this book and possible solutions are similar to the same forces at play in other visual media.

Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web, by David Weinberger
Weinberger paints a picture about what the web is, what it does, and what it tells us about ourselves.

The Complete Maus, by Art Spiegelman
A collection of the landmark graphic novels Maus I and Maus II.

Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud
McCloud shows how comics are constructed, showing how in comic form; an excellent resource for anyone interested in visual communication.

Posted by Ryan Torma at 08:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On recomendation from Nate Frambach, I read Mieke Bal's essay Postmodern Theology as Cultural Analysis in the Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology. Bal says a number of provocative and powerful things in the essay, but this section has had me thinking for days.

As long as religious themes and narratives permeate a culture, they partake of the ideological make up of that culture. Clothed in the joint authority of moralism and aethetics, the forms they take, be they framed as "high art" or as "popular culture" -- belong to that domain of contemorary culture where theology has its part to play in the general critique, or deconstruction, of what makes that culture constrictive and limiting. A postmodern theology, then, need not decide whether God exists or not, and which one God has priveledges over which other Gods in a multiple society. Instead, staying rigorously on the side of human subjects who make up and are shaped by that culture, such an atheological theology can break open the confining limitations imposed by authoritarian religion and open up possibilities of different forms of relationality that are insensitive to old, ill-conceived taboos. If I have my way, then this is theology's postmodern mission -- if such a thing is thinkable, which, perhaps, it isn't.

I love the way Bal is thinking about theology and culture. Bal's atheological theology for the purposes of human liberation is a curious thought; I'm not sure I fully understand what it means, but I have been pondering it.

Posted by Ryan Torma at 06:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

MSN Newsweek has alerted us that after suffering through years of substandard gaming experiences, Christians will soon have a shoot 'em up option in the upcoming computer game, Left Behind: Eternal Forces. The game, based off the LeHaye & Jenkins books, brings us a new combination of entertainment & projectile theology that will be marketed at your local megachurch and in various secular venues. Be the first in your pew to have it, don't get left behind.

I really don't know what to say about this except that it is soooo American. And everytime something like this comes out, I pray that the "christian" publishing industry has finally jumped the shark. Maybe this will be the one...

Posted by Ryan Torma at 12:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)