EverNote is available free for download for today (Thursday, 11/15) only! Reaching near cult status in some circles, this app is note taker, project manager, and more all wrapped into one. From the Give Away of the Day site, this is perhaps one of their best offers yet.
[EverNote]
| [download]Labels: downloads, GTD, Technology
| Permalink | 
|
In other news on culture, evangelicals, politics, theology, movies, and other news...
In the books, Lyra is the new Eve, but an Eve who brings humanity to its full realization by eating the fruit. The climax of the trilogy comes when Lyra, the 12-year-old heroine, shares a red fruit with her friend Will. They kiss and Pullman draws a discrete curtain over the rest: "Around them there was nothing but silence, as if all the world were holding its breath" is as explicit as he gets.No doubt Dr. Peter Jones would have a field day with this, but the ironies abound. Pullman, like so much of the hedonism characterizing the current culture, is vainly struggling to realize human sexuality. In the Christian "mythos," however, Adam and Eve are created naked, are told to fruitfully procreate - i.e., they are given divine fiat to engage in sexual intercourse - and all of this nudity and sex is "very good" in the eyes of God. Contra Pullman, humanity doesn't become aware of sexuality at the Fall, rather their once beautiful nudity becomes shame to them. Where Pullman wants his prototypical Adam and Eve to attract attention with their bodies, our first parents were created to serve one another and, ultimately, their Overlord, Elohim. Pullman, like all of us sinners, would sooner get what he wanted if he would quit kicking against the goads and find his hopes already graciously promised and answered in biblical witness to Jesus Christ, who has come to restore and redeem all the problems already in this world, problems created by visions of humanity and reality like that of Pullman's.
Pullman told Rosin that this Eden-reversal scene is crucial to his effort to unravel Christian mythology: "They become aware of sexuality, of the power the body has to attract attention from someone else. This is not only natural, but a wonderful thing! To be celebrated! Why the Christian Church has spent 2,000 years condemning this glorious moment, well, that's a mystery. I want to confront that, I suppose, by telling a story that this so-called original sin is anything but. It's the thing that makes us fully human."
[links] | [blogging]Labels: Art | Culture, blogging, City of Man, GTD, Technology, theology, WtTS Stuff
| Permalink | |
Terrific post on the Sabbath. As one who both values the GTD productivity lifestyle and Reformed theology, these two vectors come to a head on Sundays. Jonathan notes,
Keeping the Sabbath, then, has exposed my idol of productivity and ambition. All of my hope is pinned on my ability to get a lot done and juggle as many things as possible. The obsession with productivity is not just my problem; it's a distinctively Western disease. In the west, you are socially rewarded for how much you sacrifice (your health, your family, your sanity) in the name of productivity. It's a massive cultural idol. Keeping the Sabbath, then, is counter-cultural precisely because it declares that productivity is not our God. Instead, our God is YHWH, the triune God of the Bible who demands our allegiance over any job, any schedule, any ambition. I believe he commands us to rest one day out of seven because he knows our temptation to place our trust in our performance in our vocations.
[Sabbath] | [productivity]
| Permalink | |
For those of you mourning the loss of The David's blog, and faithfully using your RSS feeds to Get more Things Done, this should be some small consolation: david.co Master Feed!
Labels: GTD
| Permalink | |
Reading: the latest Cutting Edge issue (and my first, for that matter)
| Permalink | |
When you read something like this, how do you handle it?
When going to college many years ago, I decided to challenge myself by setting a goal to see if I could graduate in only three semesters, taking the same classes that people would normally take over a four-year period. This article explains in detail all the time management techniques I used to successfully pull this off. I accomplished my goal by graduating with two Bachelor of Science degrees (computer science and mathematics) in just three semesters without attending summer school. I slept seven to eight hours a night, took care of my routine chores (shopping, cooking, etc), had a social life, and exercised for 30 minutes every morning. In my final semester, I even held a full time job (40 hours a week) as a game programmer and served as the Vice Chair of the local Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) chapter while taking 37 units of mostly senior-level computer science and math courses. I graduated with a 3.9 GPA and also received a special award given to the top computer science student each year.
Labels: GTD
| Permalink | |
