Dale Lature: People

20 years ago on this night

[Macro error: Can't evaluate the expression because the name "588" hasn't been defined.]

The movie we watched 20 years ago tonight. I found the DVD version of this at Blockbuster, and so I am taking that one home tonight. Perhaps some Pizza Hut pizza to go with it?

Read what I've written so far about Janet and I and "20 years"

<%radio.macros.imageref ("images/janetKelli.jpg")%>

Wife Janet and daughter Kelli (4)

<%radio.macros.imageref ("images/kelliTunnelsm.jpg")%>

Clarence Jordan

Slactavist showed a link to The Koinonia Partners site, which has a 7 minute video on Clarence Jordan. I had written to show some mutuality concerning our veneration of Tony Campolo, who was/is also a favorite speaker/writer/person

I visited Koinonia in the summer of 1974 with a small group from my high school youth group (our Youth minister had told us a few of the stories, played a few of the tapes and records, and so had influenced some of us. I wandered around in the little shack where he went to study Florence was there and told us some other stories. Ladon Sheats was there. I was 18, and some of it was over my head, but I remember the stories Clarence told (on the audio tapes), and my Dad was also kind of taken with Clarence. My dad , now retired from BellSouth, is the director of the Williamson County chapter of Habitat for Humanity.

Clarence was a graduate of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary with a doctorate in New Testament Greek. I wrote a little piece about how he influenced me when I first started onto the web in 1994

Mission: Possible

The inward-outward journey of Mary and Gordon Cosby. An Interview.

Gordon and Mary Cosby. Interviewed by Jim Wallis in Sojourners magazine (Nov-Dec 1997)

Tony Campolo Audio

[Macro error: Can't evaluate the expression because the name "588" hasn't been defined.]

Tony is certainly one I perk up and listen to, on just about any subject. Here is an 76 minute talk I just found (among others) :

""Christianity after September 11th""

If you do an Internet search on Tony Campolo, you'll probably find quite a bit of material about how Tony is a dangerous heretic, which I find laughable (if it weren't so sad......nah, I laugh anyway, because as a Sociology major in college, and a youth ministry veteran, I have been a fan of Campolo's speaking and writing since I first herard him speak in 1980.

mysterious disappearing Comments links feature fixed ....

My all-time favorite Movies: (no particular order)

Ordinary People (1980, best picture oscar)

Gandhi (1982, best picture oscar, Kingsley best actor, Atenborough best director, and 4 others)

King (a TV miniseries, 1978)

Contact (1997)

Field of Dreams (1987)

Cry Freedom (1987)

Rain Man (1988, best picture oscar, Hoffman best actor, Levinson Best Director)

Somewhere in Time (1979)

Back to the Future (1985)

Star Wars (1977)

My all time favorite Movies and TV Shows

More people appear on the radar screen of my recollection tonight, ones who opened up the possibilities for me in the new frontier opening up in the virtual landscape; one where community happened in strange and exciting new ways. Strange in terms of new medium and new technology, but with a familiar ring to it: like the things I was learning about new online acquaintances (and some new online acquaintances were people I knew of and who knew of me offline, but never really knew or understood what I cared about, nor I , them.)

I think of Ecunet and Howard Rheingold first off, because it was 1993, and I had just joined Ecunet, while I was simultaneously reading a new book by Howard, "The Virtual Community". I had always believed deeply in the value of ecumenicity within the Christain tradition but had experienced few opportunities to reallyy interact with a wide variety of Christians from diverse groups and denominations and see so many common concerns among us. "The Virtual Community" wove tale after tale of the connection spawned between distant comrades, and how they would drive long distances to meet or come to the aid of that unseen person with whom they had forged ties apparently very human, despite the huge skepticism shown these relationships by the uninitiated. The un-initiated they had to be, for once one linked across the ether to that "place" where humans meet via some story, shared concerns or interests, and felt that "connection" --- parentheses only because of the pun not intended------they were immediately aware that, values of ftf and bodily , non-verbal comunication aside, something very wholistic nevertheless was transmitted.

Via my new friends on Ecunet, and the stories and passion communicated by Howard through his marvelous story telling and optimism fo rthe online medium, I began to sense the birth of a calling that led me through the pains of learning technical things, which led to jumping in and teaching myself HTML, continuing to read similar positive , hopeful books on the human and social possibilities for online community, and ended up taking a job where I am now utilizing those technical skills and loving MOST of it. The skills have been continuously honed and expanded, but I am constantly being reeled back into the challenges that await the completion of these "potential magnets for some market": the glue that makes the place both "sticky" (bring em' back for more - the commerce hope--- and "create bonds"- the community hope......but I think we put the cart before the horse. Let's not "build and they will come" , and realize probably too late that we didn't give them reasons to stay----each other-----which , in our biz, resources for Churches, people would line the doors of places that felt more like coffeehouses or cafes or small initimate groups where people talk ABOUT the content rather than come in looking for what they're lookin' for and get it and leave
-----but rather, build with the purpose of inviting conversation, which is a much stronger base to attract interest to quality material than one paragraph marketing hype , catalog style. Amazon has shown us that surrounding conversation pieces with real conversation is what ends up showing and demonstrating value. And there are so many terribly important things for us to encourage conversation about. And we sit here negecting the fundamental values that gave birth to the growth of the Net as a place where people congregated, which led to the idea of commerce moving there i nthe first place: "Hey, there's people there, let's go there and sell stuff", which is correct spacially, but tactfully, old world broadcast and marketing is ill-suited here. It's a new world, but perhaps realy old, because its back to talkin' to fellow buyers in the marketplace, and its joining groups who bring together their valued resources around a particular concern or interest.

In Internet years, these past ten years have been a century, which qualifies some of these "spiritual seed planters" for more "balcony people" who stand out; who stand above me and shout me on; to keep the faith. Even as I must meet resistance from within the Church community or in Church-related business where I work on the ways in which our world is changing and how best to meet that world where it converses, there are other supporters who made it possible for me to find something which called out to something deep in me, and to borrow a phrase from the web programming world: something which is delightfully "extensible" for all kinds of ministry where people are.

I also work with a product called NXT (from the Company "Next Page" , formerly Folio Corp.) This product is a Web Server Product which runs on tiop of IIS, and serves up Folio infobases, which are document collections that are indexed and searchable, and we have used their product for our CD-ROM based publications for quite some time (probably since the beginnings of this department). They have recently started developing scripting support for many of the functions, which allow us to use ASP pages (and thus free us in our design from having to be too dependent on their out of the box look and feel....we can use our own, and just use some scripts to call some of the key functions (like a hitlist for a search, or bringing up one particular document from a hitlist)

Doing some further tweaking of Categories to allow for syndication of various sections......

Start bringing in the feeds!