Category: podcasts

A day of fasting

This is the kind of fast day I’m after:
to break the chains of injustice,
get rid of exploitation in the workplace,
free the oppressed,
cancel debts.
What I’m interested in seeing you do is:
sharing your food with the hungry,
inviting the homeless poor into your homes,
putting clothes on the shivering ill-clad,
being available to your own families.
Do this and the lights will turn on,
and your lives will turn around at once.
Your righteousness will pave your way.
The God of glory will secure your passage.
Then when you pray, God will answer.
You’ll call out for help and I’ll say, ‘Here I am.’

Isaiah 55:6-9

For those interested or curious, you can listen to the message I shared with my tribe yesterday.

Some Beautiful updates

I don’t normally plug our podcast here too much (at least I don’t think so) but thought I’d give you a heads up on some great interviews we’ve had recently and a few that are upcoming.

Be sure and check out somethingbeautifulpodcast.com to listen to all our past, present and future shows.

This week on the show we have the first part of my interview with Greg Garrett. Garrett’s an English professor at Baylor University and also a lay-pastor at St. David’s Episcopal Church in Austin, Texas. He recently wrote a great book – “Stories from the Edge A Theology of Grief” based on the summer he spent as a chaplain in Austin, Texas. I talked to Greg about how he dealt with his own personal “demons” and how he was led into the chaplaincy and some of what he learned in the process. Great stuff.

Also, last week we talked with Mark Batterson, pastor of National Community Church in Washington DC. Batterson recently released his second book, “Wild Goose Chase” and we talked about the book, the adventure of chasing the Holy Spirit and how Batterson has seen it play out in his own life.

Coming up we have the second half of my interview with Greg Garrett, as well as an interview with Frank Viola and a two part interview with Trucker Frank (aka Frank Schutzwhol).

I think they’re all stories worth talking about (whether you agree or disagree with the particular story) so be sure and check them out and let us know what you think.

Also, if you have a story, poem, or message that you think our listeners would love to hear — send it to us. You can send it as text only or if you’d like to record it in your own words you can send an mp3. Send all your submissions to :: somethingbeautifulpodcast (at) gmail (dot) com.

www.somethingbeautifulpodcast.com

web 2.0 rant

[rant]

So I love this idea of ambient intimacy. I love that I can get to know the folks in my community better and better through things like twitter, and facebook status updates and even their blogs.

I love that I can learn so much about people in short 140-character thoughts and quotes and comments throughout the day.

But I’m also getting annoyed that twitter is starting to become a “link dump” and/or a “read my new blog post!” @tonyjones twittered about this last week and I originally thought, well that’s a bit unkind – then I realized how many text messages (aka noise) I get throughout the day that are nothing more than “read my new blog post!”

I hate it because while I don’t mind seeing these things in facebook’s news feed or on my twitter friend feed I also see them in my RSS reader. So having an announcement about them show up on my cellphone as text messages really bugs me.

I know, I know – everyone just wants to plug their stuff — and honestly I’ve plugged a blog post here or there too. But I guess what gets me about the whole scenario is that for those folks I chose to go the extra mile in getting to know and actually opt-in to get their tweets sent to my cellphone (rather than just following them via the web). I don’t need a reminder to check your blog. And the fact that you automatically send me announcements every time you update your blog (rather than just highlighting the really good stuff) — or send a mass of tweets 3 or 4 times a day that share all your blog posts from the last several hours — makes me that less interested in following you or subscribing to your twitter feed. All the automatic posts just add to the noise and turn me off.

Am I making any sense? Maybe not — but I guess that’s why it’s a rant.

In full disclosure, the encounter blog and website are setup to automatically post a tweet anytime and every time a new blog post is updated and/or we post a new announcement or podcast to the website. So you can probably rant and rave about that and argue that I’m being biased (maybe this is where my rant/argument falls apart). However, I would argue in response that both the blog and the website are updated on a fairly limited basis and I’m/you’re not following the encounter twitter feed because you want to get to know someone better – it’s setup as a “news/announcement/prayer feed” for folks interested in encounter.

So there you have it. What say you?

[/rant]

I better post a link to this via twitter to be sure everyone knows about it and responds. 🙂

[rant continued]

update :: I also hate reading RSS feeds that don’t show the entire blog post. I don’t want to have to click “read more” or “this post continues elsewhere.” Just put the entire blog post in your RSS feed — PLEASE! I’m dumping a lot of RSS feeds right now that make me click on another link to read — it makes the entire point of RSS rather pointless.

[/rant]

Duncan McFadzean talks about micro-financing

I’m editing and listening to the next Something Beautiful Podcast – version 1.10!

Version 1.10 is a great interview that Thomas did with Duncan McFadzean who’s wrapping up his career in the secular finance world to head a start-up ministry – Seven Men. The ministry is based around micro-financing and supporting the marginalized.

From the Seven Men site:

Seven Men Limited is a new vehicle created to launch, invest in, and nurture small businesses for the purpose of bringing freedom, justice and restoration to the city of Edinburgh and around the world.

By launching a series of businesses across a range of sectors, Seven Men Limited will seek to create a sustainable flow of profits that can be used for good.

Great stuff! Thanks to Thomas for getting the interview and sharing Duncan’s story with us.

While surfing Duncan’s site I was also intrigued by his page “Understandings.” Probably the best way to describe the page is a “statement of faith.” Looking over the page I love the ways hes worded his beliefs and written them in a great manor. I may have to sit down and write a similar page…

Today actually marks Duncan’s last day at the Bank of Scottland – so have a listen to the podcast and then drop by his site and wish him luck on his new ministry and outreach.

Interesting too that this podcast will go live the same day I twittered this:

related ::
something beautiful podcast
duncan mcfadzean’s blog
seven men
wikipedia :: microfinance
my twitter feed