Optimally, of course, the two would be one and the same, but the challenge for any search algorithm is to filter noise while finding good content. For a user, this means that the temptation to focus on being found can begin to trump the need to write good content as good content, for its own sake. When a site hits this point, the quality of its articles goes downhill in a hurry – and unfortunately, if the writers have become sufficiently skilled at playing the SEO game, their articles may not decrease in rank. Then it is the users that suffer.

The problem is that algorithms can only analyze signals, and accordingly they can be fooled. The last decade and a half of internet search engine history are a long, unarguable record of one simple truth: whenever search engines get better at filtering spam, spammers get better at using the search engines’ algorithms to get their content in front of users.

Unlike email spam, a great deal of website spam isn’t really illegal or false. It’s simply badly written – but badly written in such a way as to effectively game the search engines. Motives for this vary, but usually have to do with advertising revenue or general business profits. Nothing wrong with that, as far as it goes, but it can get you in trouble in a hurry when it compromises your approach to content, and it leaves users with a bad taste in their mouths. They will come to dislike you and your site – not an optimal outcome. (Quick: how many people actually like about.com, and how many of you wish you never had to see a terrible article from that abominable sump in your search results again?)

The real danger in having an SEO tool staring me in the face is the temptation to constantly second-guess myself while writing, to think about the ways I can make the post searchable, rather than the ways I can make the post valuable. There is nothing wrong with using the tool; there is everything wrong with being used by the tool. The best way to take advantage of SEO analysis tools is to use them to tweak the post when you’re done. Ignore it during the process of writing the post; use it as an editorial tool and not a director.

If there are small, simple ways to make a post or a page more searchable, why not? If there are ways to provide more meaningful descriptions for the search engine to display, why not? But the moment that the SEO tool dictates content, rather than simply helping optimize the content you would already be creating, you’ve got a problem.

Three quarters of a year before our wedding, Jaimie began struggling with clinical depressions – depression that became increasingly severe over the course of the next twelve months, until at one point she let me know that she was struggling with thoughts of hurting herself, of not wanting to live anymore. She is, praise God, in a vastly different state emotionally now, some two years later.

Along the way, though, I began to recognize that while her struggle with depression certainly made for difficult circumstances, it was no in way responsible for my sin in those circumstances. When I was harsh or impatient or ungracious with her, and even when I quietly stewed on how this wasn’t what I had wanted or how I was sick of doing the dishes because the thought overwhelmed her, I was responsible for my sin. More than that: I alone was responsible for my sin. No matter what we were facing, my response highlighted only the state of my own heart.

Each of tends to blame our sin on our circumstances, this is nonsense – and we all know it, but none of us want to admit it. Which is easier, to say, “I couldn’t help it; I was just so stressed out that I slipped” or to admit, “You know, I was extremely stressed, and it showed that deep down, I really am like this.” Admitting that we are not so sanctified as we might hope is painful enough; confessing that we are not so sanctified as we wish others to think we are is even harder.

A friend of mine and I were recently talking through some issues in our lives in what proved to be a really productive conversation for both of us. Along the way, he noted that he can sometimes use one of his gifts not simply for the glory of God but for the approbation of others. As I thought on that comment, I realized: we all do that, and not only with our gifts. We do it with our holiness, too. Often, we are not living in a holy way because we recognize the joy it is to reflect the character of God in our lives, but because we want the affirmation of other Christians.

Praise God, then, for circumstances that deprive us of our many emotional crutches. When we are forced to deal with emotional fatigue or circumstances that push us to our limits, our hearts’ true state is revealed. Will we respond in hostility to others’ foibles when we are tired, or will we respond graciously? We will be kind to our spouses when they are doing one of those many little things that are morally neutral but irritating, or will we demean them? Will we be patient with our children when they are simply being children, or will we vent our tempers at them? Will we receive criticism humbly or will we be defensive?

One of the real measures of our sanctification is what we do in those moments of exhaustion or trial. We all face the temptation to sin. Not one of us goes a day without opportunities to choose whether we will be godly or ungodly. The two great struggles of the Christian life are recognizing that we do indeed have a choice whether or not to sin, and then exercising that choice.

Even when we have recognized that we are not the helpless victims of sin that we make ourselves out to be, this second step remains. We must, in the grace and power of the Holy Spirit, say no to sin when it comes knocking on our door. When Jaimie says something that annoys me, even when she says something truly rude, I have in that moment an opportunity to be a picture of Christ for her, or to indulge my sin. By the grace of God, all of us increasingly choose holiness – real holiness, honoring God in our hearts and not simply seeking the approval of other believers – instead of sin. And we learn to thank God for the trials that expose how far we have to go yet.

For those of you (read: almost everyone) who doesn’t keep track of WordPress releases, the software is currently at version 3.3.1; version 2.8.4 was released back in August 2009. I suspected – and confirmed with a little searching – that there is no direct upgrade path from 2.8.4 to 3.3.1. That’s not a surprise; 2.8.4 is two and a half years old and five versions out of date.

There are two available paths for upgrading WordPress. First, you can automatically upgrade as each new version comes out. This is the easiest and generally the best practice: many version updates provide both better security and new functionality. The second option is to do the upgrade manually. Upgrading WordPress manually is not hard, per se, just potentially headache-inducing if you don’t do it carefully. In some cases, upgrading manually is the only option – as in this case, where the install was years out of date and the automatic upgrade path was no longer available within the application.

Potential pitfalls

There are a number of things that can (and will) go wrong in any upgrade:

• Your theme may break.
• Some plugins may break.

When performing a manual upgrade, however, things can get even more interesting:

• You can lose data if you don’t export a backup carefully ahead of time.
• You will lose all plugins and associated data.

In this particular upgrade, I took care of some the sorts of problems that arise in an ordinary upgrade by creating a version of the site on my local test server and checking the theme. I noticed that the plugins had gone missing, but I mentally attributed this to being on a local install and moved on. My assessment was accurate, but ignored the fact that the conditions after upgrading the live site would be the same. WordPress keeps plugins around when automatically upgrading, but when upgrading manually, all plugins get deleted. Even if you include the plugins in WordPress’ plugins directory when uploading the application files, the settings will be lost.

Thankfully, recovering the functionality of the website was fairly simple. The site was only using a few plugins, and I ended up replacing the old ones with slightly or dramatically better options.

Upgrading the hard way

Note that the safest way to perform manual upgrades is still incrementally, stepping from major release to major release. However, seeing as there were five major releases to go through (2.8.4 → 2.9 → 3.00 → 3.1 → 3.2 → 3.3), I decided to take a look at the theme. Since there were no major problems with the theme in relation to WordPress 3.3, it made sense to jump all the way at once.

There were other benefits to this approach, as well: for reasons beyond me, there were over 50 different themes and quite a few plugins installed, almost none of which were being used. The database was undoubtedly very messy and the site structure was a mess. Upgrading WordPress by doing a clean install eliminated all of that.

In general, I’d prefer not to do full removal and installations again. Upgrading this way is a last-ditch approach, though it was necessary in this case. It’s much less of a hassle to follow the standard upgrade path, and whenever possible users should keep upgrading. That means that it’s incumbent on theme and plugin authors to keep their themes up to date. It may also require replacing plugins, changing designs, or paying for maintenance to keep the site working correctly over time.

Lessons for everyone (but especially professionals)

Regardless, whenever possible, users should keep their installations up to date. That will make for better security and lower costs in the long run. For many clients, however, this will not be intuitive, especially in the world of bold prompts and automatic updates they are used to in their operating systems.

It also might behoove all online application developers to make their upgrade prompts a little more noticeable and a great deal more informative, WordPress included. In any case, the onus is on designers and developers to communicate with their clients, many of whom are non-technical, the benefits of keeping the software up to date and the potential costs of not upgrading it.

You’re having a difficult time working through something, and after someone prays for you, they want to know if you’re sensing God’s assurance, and ask, “Do you have a peace, now?”

You’ve just confronted a brother or sister about their sin, and aren’t sure how well the conversation went. To comfort you, a friend asks, “Well, do you have a peace about what you did?”

Do you have a peace about that? Or, to put it in more explicitly theological terms, has the Holy Spirit supernaturally imparted a unique, subjective sense of assurance about a given subject?

When the rubber meets the road

I’ve heard this phrase all my life. Somewhere in the last five years, it began to grate on me. I’ve sat quietly on this one for a while; I don’t want to become simply a pious doctrinaire who, like the grammar-hounds always nitpicking at people’s English, is always highlighting every minor theological imprecision in people’s language. However, I do believe that our words matter, and I am a bit perplexed by this particular phrase.

The phrase is extra-biblical, of course. That’s not necessarily a problem in and of itself; we have a great deal of verbiage that is extra-biblical, including in some important cases of orthodoxy. Much of our language for the Trinity, for example, is extra-biblical, from the word “Trinity” to our technical terms (“essence,” “person,” “subsistence,” “substance,” etc.). Being extra-biblical is no indictment of a phrase. When the phrase is an common part of our Christian idiom, however, we ought to make sure it is biblical in its sentiments even if not in its wording.

And here the tires begin to squeal a bit. I suspect the idea is drawn from passages like Philippians 4:6-7 or Isaiah 26:3, both of which promise peace to those who trust in God. We can hardly say, then, that God does not offer peace to believers. Clearly, he does! However, the application so many well-intended believers seem to be drawing from these passages is strangely absent from the rest of Scripture if indeed it is their intended meaning. I cannot find a single instance of someone making a decision or trusting more in God because of a subjective sense of peace imparted to his heart by the Holy Spirit – not one.

The other way around

Perhaps we ought therefore to ask: what does it matter if you “have a peace” about something? Does Scripture give us grounds to believe that subjective experiences of peace are a means by which the Spirit speaks?

Consider: Paul writes of himself as constantly in danger, as persecuted and resisted wherever he goes. You would think, then, that if a subjective sense of peace granted by the Holy Spirit were a part of his decision-making or assurance, it would appear in his writing or in Luke’s narratives in Acts. It does not. When Paul describes his apostolic hardships, describing his ministry to the doubting Corinthian church, he writes:

We put no obstacle in anyone’s way, so that no fault may be found with our ministry, but as servants of God we commend ourselves in every way: by great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger; by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, the Holy Spirit, genuine love; by truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left; through honor and dishonor, through slander and praise. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold, we live; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, yet possessing everything. (2 Corinthians 6:3-10)

Note that of all the points Paul lays out, “a peace” does not make the list. You will find the same to be true throughout Scripture.

David was often in anguish, calling out for God to save him. Never does he mention subjective experiences of peace in guiding his decisions. Nor does “a peace” assure him of God’s faithfulness, or that circumstances will work to his favor. Likewise, Jeremiah’s righteous prayers for relief went apparently unanswered, his hopes for his countrymen were dashed on the rocks of the Babylonian invasion, and his obedience to God netted him only suffering. Read of his faithfulness in Jeremiah and his sorrow in the pages of Lamentations; you will find no trace of “a peace” – only trust in God’s righteous faithfulness.

Indeed, it is the other way around. Throughout Scripture, as in Philippians and Isaiah, peace is not the ground of the believer’s assurance, but the result of his trust. Our subjective experience of peace tells us one thing and one glorious thing only: God is with us. David did not have peace because God wanted him to know that he was doing the right thing; rather, he could rest in peace because he trusted God’s protection and believed his promises (Psalm 4:8; see the rest of the psalm for the broader picture).

A better peace

I recognize that this view butts up against many of our deeply held views and against experiences we may cherish. However, we are called to submit to the authority of Scripture. If Scripture gives us no reason to look for “a peace” as confirmation of right action, prayer, or hopes, we should look for no such thing.

Do not mistake me: I am not arguing that we do not at times enjoy a supernatural experience of peace. The Holy Spirit does sometimes grant us unique tastes of his presence. However, these are not measures of our faithfulness or the rightness of our walk with God. Nor are they indicative of whether we are making the right decision, or of how our present circumstances will turn out in the end.

We will experience fear and courage, sorrow and joy, loneliness and hope, and in all of these we may know God’s peace. We will make poor decisions and good decisions, pray in line with God’s will and not, see our hopes met and our hopes dashed, and in all of these we may know God’s peace. Thank God – what miserable people we would be if God’s peace were dependent on us or our circumstances! We are called to do one thing and one thing only: trust God.

This is a good thing. When we rely on these subjective impressions, we can easily become distraught if we are not experiencing the peace we associate with God’s favor. We begin to question whether we are walking in God’s will, or to wonder whether something is going wrong that we don’t know about, or whether we prayed the wrong thing. On the other hand, when we recognize that God’s peace is freely available to whomever trusts in him, we are freed from the tyranny of experience. We can rest completely in his goodness. We may trust that whatever comes, whatever we have done, and however we have prayed, he is working all things for good, and he will fulfill his promises. We can trust in him and rely on his character, regardless of what we feel. Would that we were all so free.

The triumph of Howard Shore’s score for The Lord of the Rings films is that it makes me want to reread the books. Again.

Those of you who know me and my history with The Lord of the Rings will know, first, that I am easily moved to reread the great myth of our age, and second, that the movies for all their excellence really missed the mark in a number of ways. The music, however, was not one of those ways, and I would go so far as to say the music was as near perfect as I can imagine.

Unlike the movies – which betray the fundamental blindness of their makers, especially about character and nobility – the music captures the best of Tolkien’s world. Whether it is the pastoral and light-hearted tone of the music for the Shire, the screeching aleatoric passages for Shelob, the soaring and thrilling strains of a hardinger for Rohan, or the pounding mechanical violence of the themes of darkness, Shore capture the world that Tolkien so masterfully laid out.

I am an unabashed fan of Tolkien; I have found nothing that compares with the scope of his imagination or the mythological riches of his legendarium. Other authors have written at greater length or with greater psychological depth. None, however, has managed to create a myth. To be fair, most of them are not trying; the modern epic fantasy is generally less interested in mythology than Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, or the other Inklings, all of whom were profoundly versed in the great authors of the past.

Tolkien was particularly unusual, however, in that the great authors he studied in his academic career – and indeed, his great loves – were drawn from an even broader stream than most of his contemporaries. Though all of them loved the great English writers, and all of them were well versed in the Greek and Roman epics as well, Tolkien loved the old Norse legends, too. And while both he and Lewis shared a love of mythology, it was only Tolkien who set out to do the impossible and fill (what he perceived to be) a profound hole in English culture: the lack of a coherent mythology. Drawing on those Norse legends he loved so deeply, he built not only the stories that are so well known and loved in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but also a vast tapestry of mythological history behind them, covering ground from Creation through the fall of Atlantis (Númenor, called Atalantë, “The Fallen”).

Tolkien and Lewis’ best known fictional worlds both have creation stories, and the stories have a great deal in common – right down to the centrality of music in the creative act. Despite these commonalities, the narratives have an enormously different feel to them – a difference that highlights the different aims and approaches of the two authors. Lewis’ story is just that: story. It is seen through the eyes of a wonder-struck boy, caught up in events whose import lies far beyond his grasp but whose present outworkings are still comprehensible to his human mind. Tolkien’s creation narrative, by contrast, is higher in form and richer in setting; it is the unobserved creation of all that is by God and the angels. Even its form, that of a great symphony, is only an explanation delivered by angels to Elves in a way that their lesser minds could grasp, as though the reality itself were so far beyond beings of flesh and blood as to defy true comprehension.

Lewis’ aim was to illustrate theological concepts through story for children – a good and noble aim, and part of the reason his books are so approachable. Diggory’s vision of Aslan’s creative song is eminently relatable: we can put ourselves in his shoes and imagine what it would be to experience what he hears and sees. Tolkien’s aim, by contrast, was mythology, and not particularly mythology for children (The Hobbit being an exception which worked its way into Middle-earth and not the other way around). Mythology has always been concerned not with what humans can hear and see but with what they cannot. It has always been grasping for invisible divinity with feeble human words unsuited for the task, but hurled upward nonetheless with the desperate need of men to grasp at realities far larger and grander than their limited vocabularies can circumscribe.

And so it is with the rest of Tolkien’s mythos. He reaches into the depths and presents stories and characters that are larger than life, heroic figures we would imitate if we could. Tolkien was great because he created true mythology. Tolkien remains great because he did not leave his world unapproachable in its vastness or its depths of history. The Lord of the Rings is mythic in its scope, its setting, its conflict, and many of its primary figures. But like Lewis, Tolkien gives us a view into the world of mythology with characters much smaller than the drama against which they are set. The small physical size of the hobbits echoes their smallness in the grand scheme of the story. They are not angelic wizards, undying elves, or kings-in-exile. They are simple beings doing their best with the days they are given. They become heroes, but never heroic. They remain, at their most excellent, merely excellent – not larger-than-life like Aragorn or Gandalf, not epic figures at all.

The lack of such a viewpoint is what makes The Silmarillion so much harder going: it is pure mythology, unadulterated by the approachable point-of-view – a form our culture left behind long since, having replaced it with the character-oriented novel and play. Yet Tolkien perceived (rightly, it seems) that still England lacked a mythology that could hint at and share in the truths of reality while being itself unreal. At the least, he needed the mythology for his own joys, and gladly he shared it with the rest of us. That he did so in the form of a novel, with characters to whom all of us can relate, meant that it was a mythology we could keep, for it was a mythology delivered in the form suitable to our day. For all its splendor, The Silmarillion generally does not, and for the average person cannot, engender the same sort of yearning that The Lord of the Rings does. It is too remote. But its presence behind The Lord of the Rings is what makes the latter work so powerfully.

There will, I think, never be another Tolkien. He filled the gap that he perceived, and so there is no need for another to come and fill it. The Lord of the Rings will never be displaced; it is one of the great epics, not only for Tolkien’s day or our own, but for all.

In our eagerness to use the new bling, we often forget how many people fought in the past decade to enable us to write code without forks and hacks and expect it to work interoperably. If you have been in this field more than a few years, you surely remember that it wasn’t always like this. The reason we now have this convenience is web standards, hard won in the Browser Wars.

You might be surprised to hear that web standards did exist during the Browser Wars too.

Every Time You Call a Proprietary Feature “CSS3,” a Kitten Dies →

The Knicks’ Jeremy Lin — Faith, Pride and Points →

Faith is not a private reality that arises from inner reflection or as a result of philosophical investigation. People receive the Spirit “by hearing with faith” (Galatians 3:2-5). When human beings hear the word of the gospel and believe, they are saved. The oral proclamation of the word is necessary for faith.

—Thomas R. Schreiner, Paul, Apostle of God’s Glory in Christ

Moreover, I realized that lots of people have the same issue, and lots of people might want to change the fonts on their page easily. So, I created this bookmarklet generator to do the trick for you. (A little later this week, I’ll be putting up a similar generator that doesn’t use Typekit, since you might be perfectly happy with the fonts on your own computer.)

From the permanent project landing page:

To generate a Typekitify! bookmarklet, you need to have a Typekit account and create a kit with the fonts you want and the domain(s) you want to use. (If you’re on a free account, you can only point at one website at a time.) Grab the Embed Code snipped from the Kit Editor and copy the part that looks like this:

http://use.typekit.com/[characters].js

While the bookmarklet does not currently support attaching unique styles to different kinds of elements, you can generate multiple bookmarklets to achieve the same effect, and rename them to differentiate them. For example, if you wanted header elements to be in FF Meta Serif and paragraphs to be in Myriad, you might make an FFMetafy! and a Myriadify!.

This takes two forms. First is the overt emphasis on the work of people who are vocational ministers, whether pastors, missionaries, college ministers, or others. I cannot count the number of godly young men and women I know who, simply because they have a passion for God and a heart to lead others, are directed into one or another of these forms of ministry. Though this is not all bad, and I am glad that many of my acquaintances are in these roles, I wonder: ought we assume that simply because someone loves the things of God, they ought to make their vocation full-time ministry?

And I have an answer: no. We should not assume that everyone who passionately loves God and his word is called to vocational ministry; quite the contrary. That we do assume this reveals just how little we honor other paths.

One of the men who most profoundly influenced my outlook on the world served as the primary teacher in my youth group throughout my teen years. He taught us how to study scripture and why, he modeled for us a passion for truth and a bedrock commitment to the authority of the Bible, he demonstrated the power of a prayer life saturated through with the word of God, and he called us to follow him in loving God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. He never received a penny for any of this.

Though he was and is a profoundly wise, biblically knowledgeable, and godly man, he made it a priority not to go into vocational ministry. Now, to ordinary evangelical ears, this sounds strange, even silly. Here we have a man who loves the word of God, is a skilled teacher and has made an enormous difference in the lives of everyone he has taught, who steadfastly refuses to become a paid minister. What in the world could motivate him?

From what I know of the reasons behind his decision, I think he is absolutely on the right track, and I wish others could grasp what he has. Years ago, he commented to me that one of the reasons that he has not chosen to become a full-time pastor is because, by remaining where he is in the workplace as a network administrator, he can have an equally great impact for the kingdom. How? By demonstrating to everyone around him that one does not have to be a vocational minister to lead a life dedicated to the glory of God, to passionately pursue righteousness, to be set apart for something higher than the petty aims of this fallen world.

Because of this commitment, he has had many opportunities through the years to share Christ with coworkers who might never have otherwise heard, and to challenge fellow believers to walk more potently with God. His example serves to repudiate all those who think that really effective gospel proclamation and exhortation is done best by someone being paid to that end.

Equally importantly, though, he has had a chance to do good work to the glory of God. Here is the other way we evangelicals have diminish non-ministerial vocations: we forget that they have value apart from their opportunities to proclaim the gospel. The work itself is valuable in the sight of God.

The Reformers understood this concept, as did many of their Puritan progeny. Indeed, one of the great triumphs of the Reformation was its recovery of and insistence on a full-orbed theology of work. The structures of the Roman Catholic church had, intentionally or otherwise (a discussion for another time), set a clear demarkation between secular and sacred tasks. The priesthood was for those who wished to truly serve God; everyone else had tasks that were perhaps necessary but certainly not glorious.

The Reformers formulated a radically different view, one founded in the creation mandate itself. They noted that Adam was not forced to work as punishment for his sin, but given work God before the Fall. They noted that every task, no matter how ignoble, could honor God when done with a joyful heart that saw the task as a gift from the Creator and an opportunity to praise the Savior. They believed that every ploughboy was of equal worth – and his job of equal worth – to any priest.

Yes, some tasks are more obviously spiritually meaningful. Some tasks have more weight and import about them. Yet the fact that being a political leader, for example, has more responsibility and greater consequence for the lives of others than does being a graphic designer does not belittle the latter. Worldly weight and import are not the same as real importance. God has created us each in his image, and we are all called to reflect his glory in unique ways – the man who manages a McDonald’s no less than the President of the United States. No task is so menial that it may not glorify God, and no task is so magnificent that it may not be ultimately meaningless.

Evangelicals have long embraced a (thoroughly American) tendency to reduces people to their jobs and their jobs to their measurable impact. That in our case the “measurable impact” is simply the number of times in a given week we share the gospel – however well or poorly, and however badly we may be doing our actualy job along the way – does not change the sad reality that we have bought the lies of our culture. Jobs are good in and of themselves; they honor God themselves, not merely as means to other God-honoring ends.

Finally, I suspect there is a third, less abstract reason that we struggle with this. For many of us, work is not a source of joy, and we can little comprehend how God would be honored in our drudgery. Too many of us have come to believe – whether because of our own sinful ways of thinking or because of the awful jobs we have to work – that work itself is a bad thing. We idolize our time off. And yet, speaking from experience born of infectious mononucleosis, I can affirm that we need work. Anyone who thinks sitting at home playing video games for a month would be nothing but fun has never had to experience it.

Making and doing are integral parts of the way we humans are built. We are not meant to be static or relaxed all the time; we are designed to work, and when we are unable to or choose not to work, we eventually waste away. That some people’s jobs are awful, unfulfilling things that can cause their own blend of misery points not to the badness of work but to the cost of the Fall.

We evangelicals need to recover a robust, truly Christ-shaped vision of work and vocation. We need to remember that we were made to work before evil ever entered the world, and that we will likely be working for the glory of God when evil has been banished for good. And it will be good.

In short, I’ll be flying. It’s going to be fun to push the machine and see just how far it will go and still perform well.

One of the major transitions Jaimie and I have already gone through is that I’ve picked up some extra work on the side. I now spend 10-15 hours a week doing back end web development consulting work. This is extremely helpful in terms of saving for seminary, as you can imagine: it pays well, and the money all goes directly into savings. What with Jaimie working as a nanny until sometime close to when Baby Girl comes, we will, God willing, be in fairly decent shape financially when we get to seminary.

I enjoy the work a lot. Programming appeals to me, especially in the area of web development. The field is constantly changing, so if you want to stay on top of it, you have to keep learning all the time. Anyone who knows me knows that fits my personality to a T. There are also opportunities for anyone to contribute tools that everyone else can find useful. (I made one of those already in my spare time, and have a couple more in the pipe. Some of them even normal, non-technical people might find useful!) I also find it incredibly rewarding to be able to finish projects, and most of the projects I’m working on right now have short turn-around times, so I can see results in a matter of days or weeks – unlike my regular job, where turnaround times are measured in years.

There is a downside, though. Namely, that I’m working an extra 10-15 hours a week. As you can imagine, Jaimie and I have had some challenges to work through. We have less time together, so we have to work harder at appreciating the times we do have, and at being intentional about using the time we have to really engage with one another. These are not bad things, per se, but they are different, and they are challenging.

Even these challenges are a blessing, though. This is a good preview: my time commitment now is comparable to what it will be while I am at Southeastern, so we get to make this transition well ahead of the other major transitions coming up in our lives. Everything will be thrown entirely on its head when our daughter is born, and then again when we move and I change jobs and start seminary and we have to find a new church.

Other than the fact that Baby Girl is kicking more frequently and a bit harder, not much else is changing here. As is often the case, life itself is fairly ordinary. Our sanctification happens bit by bit and piece by piece, not in great events.

The one major change we have experienced? Oklahoma decided to remember – at least for two or three days – that it is, in fact, wintertime. I opted not to go for a run today… because it was under 30º and quite windy all day. (The warmest it has felt all day is right now, because the wind finally stopped blowing.) By Tuesday, it will be back to feeling like early spring. There are worse things, I suppose, but I do miss my Colorado winters…

You may have more discipline than I do. But for me, the mission is everything; I’m downright religious about it. Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange have been wildly successful, but I finally realized that success at the cost of my children is not success. It is failure.

He’s right. Too many business and engineering types – especially men – think they’ll find lasting satisfaction in their jobs. Too many answers to deathbed questions point the other way, though. No one ever says, “I wish I had worked more and spent less time with my family.”
Farewell Stack Exchange →

The centrality of Christ and the new humanity formed in him signifies that all other human classes, organizations and distinctions are outmoded.

—Thomas R. Schreiner, Paul, Apostle of God’s Glory in Christ

Early on, a number of commentators suggested that this was a bad idea, that it would lead back down a nightmarish path that web design has been down once before. In the late 1990s, websites were designed specifically for Netscape or Internet Explorer. Then, after IE took over and had 95% market share, it had an implementation that did not honor the ultimate form of the CSS2 and CSS2.1 specs. The result was another “solution” that proved to be less than helpful: Quirks Mode.

In both cases, many users chose to design the website to work as effectively as possible for one specific audience, or relying on quirks to achieve specific ends. In the case of Quirks Mode specifically, a feature that was designed to allow graceful degradation ended up being used in exactly the opposite fashion. The result was that all other browsers then had to make a choice between the actual standard (in which case these sites are left in a ghetto) and the de facto standard created by widespread usage of these particular implementations.

Thankfully, aggressive evangelism for conformity with the specs over the last few years has finally started to put a dent in these practices. And then -webkit happened.

When these vendor-specific prefixes were proposed, the intent was to allow browsers to implement proposed elements of the new CSS3 specification, or experimental features that might someday become a part of a spec if they were successful. Historically minded thinkers suggested – rightly, as it turns out, though I disagreed at the time – that the result would be people relying on these for basic behavior of their sites. The responsible designers all protested that the implementations were explicitly created in a way that would encourage using them only for progressive enhancement or graceful degradation. (The age of that second link should make it clear: this is not a new battle.)

The skeptics just pointed back at Quirks Mode. The good designers carried the day. Fast forward a few years, and we’re now in an era where people are designing iPhone-specific websites relying heavily on -webkit prefixes. Suddenly, we’re back in the world of the late 90s, wondering what happened to the hard-fought victory of standards and universal accessibility. The skeptics were right. People are lazy, and if something works in WebKit, well, they’ll use it. Even if that breaks the open web.

Those same lazy designers and developers are already applying the same (lack of) principles to responsive design, even further breaking the web. And this with an approach that was proposed as the very definition of progressive enhancement!

The long and short of it is: people are lazy, people are lazy, people are lazy. Especially in the web design world. There are hundreds of thousands of designers and developers out there, and many – perhaps even a majority – of them don’t care about standards. They care about what works, and what works fastest.

There is hope, though, because the browser vendors recognize the problem, as do some of the influential voices that have helped fight this battle before. A few articles that are worth your time:

• Reading List: mobile development approaches – Bruce Lawson, who highlights the developing schism in this area and has a couple of helpful links. The two comments before mine on the article are also on target.
• Did we lose track of the big picture? – Thierry Koblentz. This is one of those links, and though I’d quibble with how he uses “responsive design,” he’s right that people are misusing and abusing the concept in precisely the way he outlines.
• CSS Working Group Minutes – scroll down to or search for “Vendor Prefixes.” This is a long read, but well worth your time. The long and short of it? Prefixes are going to be deprecated hard after their necessity is ended, to keep users from relying on them. And that’s a very, very good thing.

Hopefully, this time we’ll learn the lesson. Any tool that can be abused will be abused. The best developers and designers will follow best practices; that’s part of what makes them the best. The challenge is everyone else. The only way to keep the crowd from breaking the open web is to make best practices easy and everything else painful and hard, because most people will always take cheap and easy over right.

A big hat tip on all of this to Mat “Wilto” Marquis (@wilto), whose retweet got me rolling.

You may have more discipline than I do. But for me, the mission is everything; I’m downright religious about it. Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange have been wildly successful, but I finally realized that success at the cost of my children is not success. It is failure.

—Joel SpolskyJeff Atwood, “Farewell Stack Exchange”, Coding Horror

So I built a wrapper that tests each of a user-selected set of ligatures against the font in a user-specified set of elements!

Get it & use it

Enabling the script on your site is straightforward. You’ll need jQuery running; you can download it here or use one of several content delivery networks – Google (Documentation), Microsoft (Documentation), or jQuery CDN – if you’d prefer not to host it on your own site.

Once you have jQuery running, include the ligatures-plus.js file. You can get it here:

• Development version
• Minified version
• Google Code (with SVN repository)

General usage

Once you have included the file, you’ll just need to call the new jQuery function, presumably after the page has loaded. A typical usage might be as follows:

$(document).ready() function({
   $().ligatureTest();
});

Note that by default, the script checks against all available unicode ligatures. If you want to check against a subset, you can change the value of var WHICH_LIGATURES. Available options are COMMON (ff, fi, fl), RARE (fff, ffi, ffl, ij, IJ, st), and ALL (all of the above).

You’ll also want to set the elements to run against. In the same section, set var ELEMENT = '[comma-separated list]' for the elements you want to use ligatures on.

Typekit

Because the content may be loaded before Typekit or Google Fonts finish loading the fonts, it’s in your best interests to delay running the test until all your fonts have loaded. Gladly, Typekit and Google have made it easy to trigger functions on a webfont load event. Just run the ligature function in the handler for the Typekit font active event (as well as inactive, if you want), like so:

try {
   Typekit.load({
      active: function() {
         $().ligatureTest();
      },
      inactive: function() { ... }
   });
} catch(e) {}

How it works

I borrowed heavily from Chengyin Liu’s work on whatfont.js. The script creates a canvas, renders the ligatures in both the user-specified font and the default system serif/sans-serif font and compares them. If the system font ligature does not match the user-specified font, the ligature is rendered; otherwise it is ignored. At the end of the test, the canvas is removed.

Known issues

Flash when text restyles

Because the script is replacing HTML content, there is a flash similar to the one that occurs when loading a web-font (so you may actually get two flashes).

Changing HTML internals

If your selectors are too broad, you can mess up the internals of HTML. For example, if you run the script to include paragraph content, any link is subject to revision. For example, if you have a link like <a href="#first">link</a>, the “f i” in first may get converted to “fi” instead. The workaround now is to only use elements that do not have internal links or other HTML content that will get broken by the substitutions. Also, you can wrap your anchors around the tags to which you wish to add ligature support.

Obviously neither of these are optimal; I hope to use some pattern matching to prevent this issue in the future, but it’s a bit tricky because of some of the limitations in Javascript’s regular expression set. The lack of lookbehinds is particularly vexing in situations like this; it forces you to use negative lookaheads instead.

Default system fonts

By dint of the way the script works, you will not be able to render ligatures in the system default serif or sans-serif fonts. Unfortunately, I have yet to figure out a good way around this, because the system default fonts vary widely – they’re different on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Without doing some sort of additional processing involving OS sniffing (something I’d prefer to stay far away from), I have not yet discovered any good way to render ligatures in those fonts reliably.

Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer support is lacking at this point for all versions before IE9. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like there will ever be a solution for this one. No older version of IE supports the canvas element, and the one project that aimed to deliver canvas support stalled or got stuck on some of the problems, one of the biggest being rendering fonts in the generated canvas elements. The function degrades gracefully, however: it simply won’t display any ligatures, so the page will look normal to the user.

Font families

The last potential stumbling block is size. The ligatures file itself is small, but font sets that actually include ligatures are not. Many of the fonts supplied by Typekit include two versions of their character set – one usually has ligatures and alternate glyphs; the other is the basic set. The extended set is often five to ten times larger than the other. The same will be true if you’re using @font-face embedding.

For that reason, you’ll want to be quite particular about which fonts and which elements you actually care about. On this site, for example, I’d love to have all the text supported, and I could: the fonts I’ve chosen all support ligatures. Unfortunately, if I included the extra character sets for all the headings and paragraphs, the font files would be over 2.5Mb, and that’s just much too large. I’m probably pushing it as is with support for just the headings.

Reporting issues

If you find a bug, please let me know by sending me an email: chriskrycho.com @ web.

The future

My work

The first thing I want to do is fix this so that whatever tags are passed to the jQuery object are the tags used to pick ligatures. I may also add an optional parameter to the function to allow users to specify which ligatures to test for more easily. Once I have those things done, I’ll think about turning into a full-on jQuery plugin, as well as potentially creating WordPress and Blogger plugins for other, less technically savvy people to use.

At some point, I hope to add create some events that will prevent a flash from substituting the text, similar to the way Typekit does for loading webfonts. (As an aside, you can skip this problem if you are using Typekit’s events; the code I supplied above shouldn’t have this issue.)

Browser updates

Within the next two to three years, I hope to see the need for this script largely disappear. Firefox 4 and later already have some basic support to render OpenType font variants including ligatures (using -moz-font-feature-settings). Hopefully Webkit (both Safari and Chrome), IE, and Opera will all add support in the near future as well, at which point this tool can be happily retired.

Regardless of how the rendering technology develops, size constraints will still be an issue. I hoped that over the next few years, font providers will start enabling finer-grained control over which characters are included in the set. In my case, the only additional characters I am interested in right now are ligatures… but I get nearly a full megabyte worth of extra characters beyond that just to get them. Hopefully Typekit, Google Fonts, FontFont, and other font CDNs will take note, as will publishers of web font families. Optimally, web designers and developers should have fine-grained control – right down to the individual character.

Case in point: yesterday I reviewed Walter Wangerin Jr.’s The Book of the Dun Cow. (I would love it if you read my review. The book, however, is not optional. Put it at the top of your list.) The review is hardly phenomenal writing, but it is decent. WhenI set out to write a post relating my experience running to walking with God this afternoon, the results were less satisfying, to say the least. Truth be told, I think I need to just set the post aside until I can rewrite it from scratch. It’s that bad.

Now, the post is not riddled with grammatical errors, or even badly organized. Worse: it is boring. The cardinal crime of creativity, worse even than publishing something ugly is to publish something boring. Ugliness at least has the redeeming feature of evoking some emotion, even if only revulsion. Boring art, by contrast, fails to deliver on the basic promise of the creative act: that it will communicate from one soul to another. No one should ever publish boring work by choice, not even in a textbook.

Blog posts are admittedly not the standard of high art, or any art at all. Most of the web is populated by what may generously be described as droll. That is no excuse, though: anyone who professes to care about art and artistry – much less the sort person who would name a blog “the art of artistry,” translated into Latin – should ever think, “Ah, well, good enough to fit in with the rest of the dreck that passes for content on the web” and let rip another pathetic excuse for good writing.

So I won’t. I will leave the post in draft form until I can take the good ideas in it and turn them into the sort of thing I would want to read, instead of the embarrassing mess currently in the dock.

This is how good art happens: by repetition, hard work, and throwing away the garbage you create until you stop creating garbage.

It is true that the creative act is mysterious, of course. We wonder where the words, the music, the images come from, and find no answer true enough to fully plumbs those depths. We wonder to hear from our own souls the faint echo of the word that spoke our being into being.

In another sense, however, creative work is just like every other kind of work. It is, obvious to say, work. Success requires diligent effort. No one ever becomes a truly excellent musician, sculptor, painter, or writer by sitting around pondering the mystery of creativity, any more than one becomes a skilled engineer by thinking about the beauty of equations. (This might be the time to make a joke about philosophers or mathematicians, but I will leave low-hanging fruit for another day.) Every art requires skill, and skill requires practice.

In that sense, then, the poorly written post I churned out earlier was not a failure, per se. To be sure, I did not achieve the goal I set for myself: to communicate theological truth in a meaningful, winsome, and elegant way. I did, however, write, and that is something meaningful and important in its own way. Just as the musician counts it a success to have practiced, even if the practice went badly, I will count today a success because I wrote, even if I wrote badly. I will write again tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. Consistency, I trust, will have its reward.

I had never heard of Walter Wangerin Jr. until Kevin DeYoung recommended this book at the end of last year. I now intend to read every book in Wangerin’s oeuvre. This book was that good.

In those days, when the animals could both speek and understand speech, the world was round as it is today. It encountered the four seasons, endured night, rejoiced in the day, offered waking and sleeping, hurt, anger, love, and peace to all of the creatures who dwelt upon it—as it does today. Birth happened, lives were lived out upon the face of it, and then death followed. These things were no different from the way they are today. But yet some things were very different.

For in those days the earth was still fixed in the absolute center of the universe. It had not yet been cracked loose from that holy place, to be sent whirling—wild, helpless, and ignorant—among the blind stars.

Wangerin is a good writer. His prose may surprise you, though; it is old-fashioned. Not in the sense of difficult-to-follow, but rather in the way it rejects the journalistic prose so fashionable in most modern fiction. He is not wordy or pedantic; it is just that he is enchanted with words, and seems determined in the best way to enchant the reader with them, too. The narrative voice is perhaps the most surprising: Wangerin happily employs an omniscient third person narrator, and does it well.

The plot is simple and the characters equally so, at least at first blush. As the pages unfold, though, both plot and characters unveil considerable resonance and depth. The characters remain simple, but they are neither flat nor static. Likewise, the plot is never complex, but it takes shape as something more akin to mythology than mere adventure.

Though Wangerin is writing in a genre near that of Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, with his talking animals and fantastical world, the kinship with Tolkien is equally apparent. There is an intentional sense of mythic proportion to the events as they unfold. The omniscient narrator, the soaring language, the clearly explained antiquity of the setting: all evoke that same sense of ancient grandeur and mythological scale that Tolkien carried off so well.

Behind them all – Tolkien, Lewis, and Wangerin – stands the great tradition of English poets and storytellers. (Wangerin explicitly points to Chaucer in his afterword.)

Many modern novelists seem to have forgotten that their predecessors who truly excelled were nearly always lovers of the literature of the past. If people today cannot muster the profundity or power of language that Chesterton did, it is at least partly because they are not reading the books he did. How many of us read any Chaucer at all in school? And how many of us learned to love him, or John Donne, or Milton, or even Shakespeare? Truly great writing is born of truly great reading.

This is one half of the slow death of truly wonderful – that is, wonder-inducing – writing. Journalistic sensibilities have pushed novelists toward the urgent, the now, and left behind the past, even as they have murdered passionate prose in the name of brevity. Wangerin deftly dodges this other half, too: he values the power and glory of words as well as their utility.

Too many novelists treat words as nothing more than their meanings, shorn of any hint of power – a notion that the book’s plot rejects just as firmly as Wangerin’s prose does, and rightly so. When Hemingway and others decried wordiness, it was not because they were opposed to length itself length itself, or space given over for pure beauty. It was precisely because they recognized the power of a word well chosen. Equally, if every page is overflowing with words, they lose their impact. But every really great writer is willing to stop at times and simply let the beauty and power of language carry the book to heights greater than the mere transfer of information. The difference between a great writer and a merely good one, is this: the great one knows both that words have beauty to revel in, and that too many words drown the reader.

A final thought: The Book of the Dun Cow stirred my soul. It reminded me that we fight evil outside us, but that we must fight temptation and despair within just as fiercly. It reminded me that God’s ways are not mine. It reminded me that words have power and that choices in the dark have consequences in the light. It did all this without ever, ever preaching.

In his afterword, Wangerin spells out an aversion to allegory that sounds much like a similar explanation penned by Tolkien a quarter century earlier. Neither of them approved of stories that could be reduced to meaning – as Wangerin puts it, “This means that.” Many Christian authors would be well served by Wangerin’s pointed reminder:

Should I, the author, ever state in uncertain terms what my book means, it would cease to be a living thing; it would cease to be the novel it might have been, and would rather become an illustration of some defining, delimiting concept. Sermons do that well and right properly. Novels in which the themes demand intellectual attention can only be novels in spite of these didactic interruptions.

He is absolutely right, of course. Sermonizing is appropriate in a pulpit, but never in a novel. The Book of the Dun Cow was like a breath of fresh air after a week in Los Angeles – desperately beautiful. Would that there were more such books. I commend it to you.

“Hello, Jaimie Dawn.”

“Hi! *belch*“

“You burped!”

“Yes. *giggle* Are you coming home now?”

Two days in a row. I’m eagerly awaiting today’s conversation to see if it happens again.

No one tells you about many of the hilarious side effects when you start down this road we call pregnancy. Some of them are expected, sure, but others… not so much. Three bathroom breaks in a single 45-minute episode of Chuck? Well, okay, that makes sense: Baby is probably having fun sitting on, kicking, or otherwise interacting with Jaimie’s bladder.

Likewise, the random mood swings are a well-known phenomenon, and something I was therefore prepared for. Again, they make sense: there are even higher concentrations of hormones flooding Jaimie’s body than ever before, and in less predictable ways than she is used to. Accordingly, all of her emotions are ginormous. Good things are amazing. Bad things are horrible. Again: no surprise here.

Though the mechanisms behind them are slightly less obvious, odd food cravings too are to be expected. My mother apparently asked my father to get her a Wendy’s hamburger with McDonald’s french fries… an eminently sensible combination going by taste, but amusing nonetheless. Jaimie’s cravings have included jello, McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets (and terrible chicken nuggets in general), fruit snacks, and water with lemons in it. This last one has gotten so bad that she can’t drink water without lemon juice in it anymore.

Again, these are all expected. Brain malfunction, though? No one told me that was coming. Nor did anyone think to give me any warning about the impending assault of belches. But here they are, and apparently to stay. Though the last few days are the only times they’ve been part of a greeting, we’ve certainly experienced them with much more frequency in general throughout the whole pregnancy.

So, dear friends and family with experience: what other delightful (?) surprises can I expect as we enter the final trimester?

Do you notice that nobody really uses that word [creativity] about other types of music? I just was perusing some Itunes user reviews to see if this holds up. I checked John Mark and mine, and “creativity” is very often found. But it’s not often found in reviews of bands like Sigur Ros, Bon Iver, Radiohead, Sufjan Stevens or other artists who are certainly very “creative.”

Nobody goes to an art gallery and says, “boy, that painting is so creative.” Why? Because it’s art! Of course it’s creative! Why else would it be there? It’s very nature is creativity. Or like Lisa pointed out to me today, “that would be like saying, I love your house, it’s so architectural.”

But when someone in the Christian industry actually takes their art seriously, everybody is like “holy crap, listen to how creative it is!”

It’s like a person that’s been living among zombies for years seeing an actual human being and exclaiming, “wow, look at how clean her face is! She doesn’t even have any blood on it or anything!”

Zombies, Wine, and Christian Music→

The gospel carries its own offense; it is already a fragrance of death to those who are perishing (2 Cor. 2:15), no need to add our own three acres of onions to it.

—Scott Oliphint, “Fast and Furious Fulmination,” reformation21 blog

I think when the default mode of cultural engagement is that our parents were wrong and we’re out to fix it, we risk inoculating ourselves against any form of self-criticism. Myopia breeds only more myopia: if we don’t have the vision to see both the good and the bad of what we’ve inherited, we’ll never learn to truly see both the good and the bad of what we’re contributing. Chesterton once wrote something to the effect that love is blind–it’s bound, and because it’s bound, it sees more clearly than anything else. I think the same sort of thing is true of our cultural engagement: if we recognize the ways in which our lives our bound up in our parents, for both good and ill, we’ll see ourselves and the world more clearly and act more effectively in it.

Matt’s comment here is on point for at least three reasons, each of which bears elaboration.

First is that setting one generation in opposition to another is simply, factually wrong. While it is possible to recognize patterns and broad strokes, we do not live in broad strokes. Rather, we each live in our own particularities. The unique failures of your parents are not the unique failures of my parents, just as my unique failures are not yours. The failures of my church are not the failures of yours, and vice versa. Nor are there hard lines between one generation and the next. Boomers overlap with Gen X-ers overlap with Millennials overlap with whatever they’re calling the generation after mine. The tendencies of each blur into the next, and young people plainly shape older generations, too – especially in our youth-focused culture.

As Matt pointed out near the end of that quote, it’s also simply ignorant. We are much much like our parents, in ways that many of us often don’t realize until we are much older. From the tiniest details such as handwriting or the shape of a full-throated laugh, to the big picture items of how we understand the world, we cannot escape our parents’ influence. It is folly, sheer and brazen, to think that our reactions against their failures are somehow free and clear of the shape our parents gave to us.

Note, too, the historical ignorance and hubris here. Because we can see the consequences of our parents’ choices for the church, we think we see more clearly than them. But hindsight is always 20/20, and our examination of their decisions can be nothing but hindsight. They, too, were seeking God as best they knew how. As we look at our own situation, it is far easier to critique our parents’ failings than it is to see clearly the consequences of our own choices twenty years hence. More, many of us are the believers we are today because of our parents; we could use to remember that if we think we see more clearly than them – that even if we do see more clearly than them, and I find that doubtful on the whole – it is only because we are standing on their shoulders.

Second is that reactionary movements tend in the end toward the catastrophic. A movement with positive goals can sustain itself it the long run. A movement grounded in disagreement, however, will tear itself apart when it runs out of other targets. If the Millennials (people of my generation) want to leave a lasting legacy of good for the church, we need to simply pursue the good as defined by Scripture, not fixate on our parents’ failures. To the extent that we are committed to the pursuit of faithfulness, rather than vindicating ourselves and trumping previous generations, we will make progress in righting wrongs. To the extent that we are fixated on demonstrating our own superiority – whether we put it in those terms or not – we will fail, and fail badly.

Third, and most importantly, characterizing one generation’s relationship to those that preceded it in these terms of righting wrongs is unbiblical. The attitude reflects the view – broadly accepted by American culture – that wisdom is found in the young, and that the old are but hindrances to progress. What nonsense! While there are cultures in the world that run the danger of overemphasizing the wisdom of age, ours is not one of them. Scripture teaches us to listen to those who have gone before us, to value their wisdom, and to honor them. Especially our parents, whom we are told to honor without condition.

Midway through college, a friend commented that constantly seeing our parents as the problem that we’re going to fix is distinctly unhelpful, and nowhere more so than in the church. God has given us all to each other for mutual benefit and edification. She was right, and her gentle criticism stuck. We have gone off the rails if we see the problems of the church primarily in terms of other generations’ failings. Perhaps we can see our parents’ failings more clearly than they can. However, it is likely we can also see their faults better than our own – and likely, too, that they can see our faults better than we can.

Perhaps we ought to consider that our parents are well aware of many of the ways their choices have played out. In the areas that we do see more clearly, it is nonetheless possible they are better equipped to make wise decision about how to correct course than we are. The way forward for the church is not in younger generation rising up to fix the failures of those who have gone before them, nor in older people dismissing the critiques that younger men and women might offer. Nor is it in the younger generations ignoring the cautions offered by older, or older generations too swiftly adopting every whim of the young. Rather, we must all of us seek to submit ourselves to Scripture, and learn from each other. The way forward is in mutual encouragement and love.

You don’t really know a language till you know the library and the tools. Syntax is easy.

Look: any trained C/C++/Java developer can pick up the syntax of Javascript or PHP in no time flat. They’re just not that different; the hardest adjustments are to using an interpreted language instead of a compiled language, and to dynamic typing instead of static typing. Even with a language a bit further out – Python or Ruby, for example – the syntax remains relatively straightforward to learn.

But here’s the trick: a language is more than syntax. Think about it: English is more than its grammar, and indeed more than merely its vocabulary. Learning English requires first learning its vocabulary and its grammatical rules. Mastering English, however, requires learning far more than simply words and the basics of how they fit together. It involves gaining a knowledge of connotation as well as denotation. It requires understanding of culture. It demands grasping the ways that different words and phrases and approaches are appropriate (or not) in various contexts.

The same is true for a programming language. It is one thing to know how to construct a foreach statement in PHP. It is another thing entirely to recognize that sometimes you’re better using a library function that does the same thing you want your loop to do, only faster and better. You have to learn the libraries, and in some cases you have to learn the standard tool sets.

Learning Ruby is one thing. Putting it in practice in the web development community means learning more than Ruby or even its standard library though; the vast majority of Ruby web development these days seems to be using the Rails framework. Similarly, you can have a good handle on PHP and even know its library well – but you’ll be much more employable if you also know the Zend framework, because while it’s not quite an industry standard, it’s close.

Even back in the world of static software, this is true. Good luck becoming a top-notch C++ programmer in a short time. Learning the way C++ approaches object-oriented development is simple. Learning the enormous library will take longer. Getting a good handle on templates? You’ll be at that for a while.

This is the thing so many people fail to understand: software engineering (and even programming, which is only a subset of engineering) is more than knowing some syntax or the basics of logic. Being a really good developer – being the kind of developer I hope to be someday – requires having a good handle on the language and its library, its strengths and its quirks, the primary tool kits and the corner cases. It is not enough to be able to regurgitate the syntactical rules for the language; best practices come to be over time as people discover both the benefits and the costs of various approaches. The most obvious solution may also end up being the wrong solution.

The only way to gain this knowledge is by immersing yourself in using it and by studying. You can either repeat the same mistakes everyone else has already made, or you can put forth the effort to educate yourself so you can avoid them. You can either content yourself with a superficial understanding of the language, or you can dive in and really get a handle on how it works and what really makes it tick.

Shockingly, these are the same realities that apply to learning any new subject. No one ever mastered the piano, or became a skillful tennis player, or really succeeded at gaining any skill without putting in significant time and effort. If one of the major benefits of the modern web design and development is that just anyone can jump in and start doing it, one of the problems is the same reality – because most of the people who jump in and start are not willing to do the hard work to actually become good at their field. They don’t want to study, they don’t want to dig in to the hows and whys as well as the whats of any given discipline. And accordingly, they just aren’t very good.

If you’re not prepared to work hard, be prepared to always be a third-rater. If you want to do well, be prepared to work hard. Stop thinking you know a language because you know the syntax. Stop thinking you know design principles because you’ve read a few articles. Stop thinking you don’t need to study any more. You always need to study more.

The world is flat.

In spring and early summer 2011, tens of thousands across northern Africa rose in protests. Starting in Tunisia and Egypt, a ripple of largely peaceful movements spread across a sizeable portion of the Muslim world. Two factors were particularly remarkable, to my way of thinking, in this surge of political self-will.

First, the protests coalesced in response to particular acts of indecency by the governments – but such acts had happened many times before. These acts triggered a response because they were inevitably far more public than they had been in the past. Inevitably, I say, because this is the age of ubiquitous cell phones with video cameras, and also the age of Youtube, where every video can capture a global audience.

Second, these movements propagated through new media. Not only were they were instigated by socially propagating video, they were coordinated largely through social media – Twitter and Facebook especially. Moreover, they were almost entirely decentralized. While the movements had spokesmen and instigators, they gained their power through the rapid spread of ideas and plans through the social networks, not through ordinary organization and hierarchy.

The world is flat.

The book

Thomas Friedman has been making this point for the better part of a decade now. In The World is Flat, he lays out not only what has happened, as in the examples above, but also how. Over the last few decades, there have been a number of enormous advances in technology that have converged to allow people all over the world to interact and collaborate in ways unimaginable in all the previous millennia of human history. This technological progress has combined with the opening of a number of previously closed economies to allow vast new markets to open – markets not only for sales, but for workers.

Friedman spends most of his time on the impact this globalization has on businesses and how Americans should respond in the business and education sectors, though he takes time in his conclusion to address the broader ethical implications of these changes.

Though Friedman’s comments on education and ethics are interesting, I think his views on business, entrepreneurship, and charity are the points to which today’s Christians should be paying the most attention. First, he notes that “big can act small,” that is, large companies can move extremely quickly by taking advantage of the new world. This is how Amazon can deliver a book to your door the day after you order it (as happened to me last week), or large chains can make prices low and keep inventories well coordinated.

On the flip side, he notes that “small can act big:” individuals can now be as effective as large corporations in many businesses by taking advantage of the large business tools that are available to everyone. Later in the book he applies this latter principle to the concept of charity work, as well, noting that some of the best charitable projects of recent years have come about by individuals recognizing needs and moving on them, taking advantage of the many tools afforded them my modern technology.

Both of these are equally true of Christians who want to reach the world with the good news of Jesus.

More effective world Christians

Christians should be slow to model the practices of the church on business, but we should not ignore the lessons businesses have learned these past twenty years. We are not profit-makers, and efficiency is not our highest goal, but careful consideration may point out areas we can be more effective stewards of the financial resources God has entrusted to us.. Christian organizations can learn from the ways that large businesses have successfully put these new technologies to use. For example, many tasks can be automated or streamlined that formerly required hand work. Organizations may also find that they can bring operations in house that were formerly taken care of by outside contractors.

And yes, Christians can and should think about “outsourcing.” Christians here can benefit Christians in struggling economies abroad by sourcing jobs there – without the sort of fear-mongering that has too often dominated the discussion in America. The more we can partner with the rest of the global church, the healthier both the global church and the American church will be. Dependency and an imperialistic mindset both betray the equality to which God has called us. Instead, those of us who are rich – which is to say, nearly all Americans – should share liberally with those who are not. That includes sharing our jobs, when and where we can.

As a quick aside, Friedman’s discussion of the way people have used small business to help kickstart real economic growth in third-world countries should be required reading. I wish that more Christians would think about how to use their vocation for the benefit of others. As a teacher of mine put it: poor people’s greatest need is not actually food, money, clothing, or any other good, but rather a job. Christian business people now have countless opportunities in this flat new world to do business in a way that really helps the poor.

But globalization is not simply about the spread of capitalism or markets or enhanced trade. It is not simply an economic phenomenon and its impact is not exclusively economic. It is a much broader, deeper, and more complex phenomenon, involving new forms of communication and innovation. The flattening of the world is about the creation of a global platform for multiple forms of sharing work, knowledge, and entertainment.
(p. 482)

The other side of this is the reality that small churches and even individuals can accomplish far more than they could have just a few decades ago. To take just one example, consider small group discussion materials. While there are certainly still many courses and curricula being created by professional publishers, there are also a broad array of alternatives being created by small teams or individual teachers at local churches. Because the internet is an extremely low cost distribution platform, these alternatives can often be distributed for free. At my own church, one of our pastors has created Bible study plans for a number of topics and books of the Bible, plans made freely available on the church’s website. Anyone in all the world can take advantage of them.

Or, for another example, take the enterprising idea some missions workers have had in the past few years: passing information to local believers – books, Bibles, sermons, any kind of content imaginable – on small flash devices. These sorts of efforts do not require massive institutional overhead. They simply require someone to think about the ways technology can serve the needs of the church, especially the oppressed church, and then to do it. The costs and barriers to entry are low enough that you or I can make a real difference on the other side of the world in remarkable ways.

We are called to be world Christians, with a view bigger than our own little corner of the globe. Our first allegiance is not to American supremacy, but to the kingdom of God. Accordingly, we should consider how our actions may be hurting or benefiting other believers on the other side of the world. Further, we should actively look for ways to take advantage of the new opportunities before us to extend our reach as individual churches and believers, and to do our work more effectively and responsibly as larger organizations.

Great power, great responsibility

There is a second major application of Friedman’s thesis: the flattening of the world means anyone, anywhere, can publish their thoughts and find an audience. The democratization of media means that many more Christians can offer their perspectives the broader church of Christ – for good or for ill. It is to this reality that we now turn.

The fact is that the world has gotten flat and more interconnected much faster than people have developed the norms and ethics to have their words go everywhere unedited and uncensored, and much faster than people have adapted to hearing everything whispered about them. Democracy is great, but democracy without responsibility is truly frightening.
(p. 527)

Anyone who has spent much time in the Christian part of the blogosphere knows that it is a fairly equal mix of thoughtful commentary, bloviation, and imbecilic assaults on character. (To be fair, I think most Christian bloggers are aiming for thoughtful commentary; the problem is that so few actually achieve that goal.) Whatever the topic, many of the voices chiming in are either ignorant, graceless, or both.

As Friedman notes, people have simply not had time to develop the sense of responsibility to accompany their new power. Christians of every stripe, at every age, with every level of theological education, now have the ability to voice their views on any and every topic. In some ways, this is fantastic. Many Christian bloggers are godly believers who have wise perspectives to offer – single moms juggling families and jobs, young people brimming over with passion, 65-year-old Sunday school teachers. I praise God that these people can now share their God-given gifts with the rest of us.

Unfortunately, however, this democratization of publication means that the intemperate young believers, the cage-phase Calvinists, the gossips, and the backbiters have just as broad a platform as anyone. I have seen Christians create smear campaigns, accuse people of rank heresy, and pass on rumors as true. I have seen people make sweeping theological pronouncements so far removed from Scripture as to be unrecognizable, and be hailed as great fonts of wisdom. I have seen Christian witness tarred and tarnished by uncountable blog posts and comment threads that degenerate into unrestrained incivility.

At its best, cyberspace adds to the richness of the public debate and brings forward new and valuable voices who might never have been heard from before. But at its worst, it brings forward more extreme and irresponsible voices with fewer restraints and enables them to throw more spitballs farther and bigger than ever before.
(p. 530)

Just because everyone can publish their thoughts to the wide world, in other words, does not mean they should. With great power comes responsibility, and all that. Many Christians are spreading their opinions far and wide who simply should not be – or at the least, they need good editors, preferably editors with a pastoral bent.

I subscribe to dozens of blogs by pastors, moms, scholars, and engineers who have greatly enriched my faith – people I would never have known without the Internet. I praise God that you and I can share our love for Christ and yet potentially never meet face to face until heaven. But it grieves me deeply that many Christians write with assumed authority they have not earned on subjects they have not studied in ways that dishonor Christ. We must do better. We must be more careful in our interaction with one another. We must grow in humility, patience, kindness and grace. We must learn to simply be silent sometimes.

The pace of change

One final point worth considering carefully is just how fast the world is changing today. Though this third edition was published in 2007, only five years ago, some of its contents are already remarkably dated. For the simplest examples, take the pervasive references to then-dominant Myspace, or Friedman’s frequent use of the word “cyberspace” – a word that has all but fallen out of our lexicon in the intervening years. Facebook now rules the roost and Myspace is all but dead. Likewise, the internet is no longer a mentally distinct space for most of us; it is simply an integral and ordinary part of our lives.

Christians cannot afford to pretend that the world is not changing. We should be hesitant to stake out any position too firmly if the position depends on certain technological realities that are prone to change. Neither can we afford to be slaves to the new; that there is some innovation available to us does not necessarily mean it is helpful. The challenge, then, is to evaluate each innovation as it comes down the line and carefully examine its costs and its benefits. More than that, we must continue to evaluate costs and benefits over time; none of us can see all the uses to which a given technology will be put when we first encounter it. (Others have written on this topic at great length; for a contemporary, consistently thoughtful and Christ-centered introduction to this field, see John Dyer’s blog or his recent book From the Garden to the City.)

Theological truths are constant, but culture and technology are very much in flex. The twin temptations are to let our theology change with culture, or to hold our cultural and technological views with the firmness that we should accord only theology. We should hold our doctrines firmly, and respond to changing culture and technology in light of truth – not the other way around.

Conclusion

Friedman’s book is an excellent resource, and believers interested in being true “world Christians” need to consider its lessons carefully. We have a responsibility to take the gospel to all the world, and we have more effective tools to accomplish that end than ever before. That will require us to learn to use the tools well, and also to recognize their limitations – and ours. In our blogging here at home, our efforts to use business to benefit the poor abroad, and in the work of global missions, the changes wrought by globalization cannot be ignored. Accordingly, this book should be required reading for pastors, entrepreneurs, and blogger moms. In particular, the first section of the book, which explains what has happened and how, and then chapters 12–14 would be profitable for nearly every Christian.

The World is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
©2007 Thomas L. Friedman
Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010

The rain never stopped.

Sometimes it was no more than a chill mist sitting on the air; other times it came down suddenly, like an angry fist, and the Coop shuddered against it. The sky stood iron above. And the weird wind was ever out of the east.

The trees lost their leaves, but there was no beauty in it this year, not any color but rot. It was as if they had simply given up to the moisture and the cold, and forgotten life. Nor was there any crackling of dry leaves, nor the sharp scent—clean and musty—of falling leaves, nor the blue bit of the year going out. Damp foliage was stripped from the trees by an everlasting rain. The naked trees shivered. That was all.

—Walter Wangerin Jr., The Book of the Dun Cow, p. 63

The raining never stopped. From horizon to horizon, the clouds were locked in place, and the earth was shut up. An east wind—an odd wind to command the weather—brought this wetness and never stopped bringing it.

But perhaps God looked down from his heaven and had pity upon the Coop, for a merciful change occurred in the rain. It became snow. And where water as rain was mere misery, the same water as snow was a soft delight: A hard freeze made the ground bony and firm; snow followed to whiten and to reveal the gentle contour of that ground; the cold air snapped life into the creatures who ventured forth to walk on it; the forest greeted them, tinkling and clinking as if its great trees had tiny voices-and more than any of that, the Coop became muffled in its warmth, because snow drifted up the outside of its walls.

—ibid., p. 70

It is one of the coolest, strangest, most awesome, most mind-boggling things I have ever felt. There is a little person in there, growing – now big enough that when she moves and pushes or kicks against the womb, I can feel it.

In a few months, she’ll be so big that we’ll be seeing it when she’s stretching and kicking.

A few months after that, we’ll be holding her.

The thought awes me, and it has brought me near to tears a few times already. There is already a sense of responsibility and weight and fearful expectation. I am going to be this little girl’s father, her first picture of a father.

I have seen, in many people’s lives, how their relationship with their father informs their understanding of God. That is as it should be: God created the human relationship of father to child as a model of our relationship to him, just as marriage is a picture of Christ and the church.

If we are not struck by the responsibility we have to present him well – as faithful husbands and gracious, loving fathers – we do not understand what marriage and fatherhood are at their core very well at all.

Every time I get a better sense of what marriage means, and now as I first begin to grasp what being a father means, I understand the weight that God has put on my shoulders and I am driven back to him. There is no way I can do this as I should on my own, no way that in my own understanding and wisdom I can present God as he is.

Yet the Spirit gives grace, and Christ has united us to him, and the Father himself loves us. Praise God that our hope is not in our own strength, but in Christ who has become our wisdom as well as our righteousness.

Long they stand ungraced by other company, till
Night rolls back her drapery, leads forth at last uncounted host –
Sentinels in bright attire and bold, striding forth – that
They, argentate mistresses of even sky, might know
They stand, not lonely after all, but with great cloud of
Lookers-on, emboldening their hopeful wait for morn’s return

I nodded in amusement as the dream spilled out, and was still smiling as she finished.

She concluded her story, tilted her head to the side, and frowned at me for a moment. Just as I was about to ask her what was up, she marched into the bathroom. A few minutes later, she came out and went directly back to bed without saying a word to me.

The next morning, I asked her about the dreams, and she proceeded to explain them again. I wondered – aloud, of course – if she realized that she had in fact awoken and spoken with me. (She said yes.)

Perhaps the most amusing part of the incident, from my point of view, was how she finished her story, frowned, and immediately headed into the bathroom, only to emerge and go directly to bed without saying anything further. There was no conversation, and I cracked up as she closed the door behind her. I have no idea what was passing through her head in those moments, but it certainly provided some much-needed relief and humor in the midst of a long evening of working.

If you know me, you know how works-oriented I am, constantly thinking that I need to meet my Christian quota in order to earn or maintain God’s love. You’d think I would want someone to debunk that myth for me. Many loved ones and mentors have tried. I always thought I wasn’t getting over my works-guilt-complex because of some personal inability to do so, but on reading the aforementioned quote, I suddenly realized that I didn’t want to get over the complex. I didn’t want to pray for God to provide my needs and let him answer. I didn’t want to glorify God, because I want to do it myself.

Frightening Revelation→

The only way to get a clear picture…

Problems with the tripod, alas…

we’d call a tree a fool
who’d give leaf to
january…

“we’d call a tree a fool”→

I missed it. More even than I realized, until I began writing again. As I quickly pounded out a post for Ardent Fidelity last night, I experienced a particular happiness I had not felt in quite some time.

Writing, as I explained to Jaimie a few days ago, is not only relaxing and fun but also incredibly productive. I think as I write, and so I come to understand the topic on which I am writing better in the act of creation. (I have, on occasion, had to rewrite initial sections of blog posts entirely when I ended up coming to a different conclusion than I expected when I began writing.)

Unfortunately, I have gotten rusty. After finishing those 10,000 words of a stab at a novel, I produced less than 5,000 words of published content the rest of 2011. It shows. My writing is a bit choppy, a bit less polished than I would prefer. I need to edit more, tighten things up around the edges more. My idiosyncrasies are back, though perhaps a bit more restrained than they once were. My “voice” is blurrier.

Thankfully, as with all creative arts, practice makes better. (Not perfect, but better.) Accordingly, I will get better if I can write just a few times a week, in the various genres this new site layout so readily affords – musings on art here, conversational discussions of family life over at On the Hearth, technical discussions at Designgineering, and theological thought (some of it very carefully organized and structured) at Ardent Fidelity. I am hoping that the breadth of content will push me in ways that my old blogs have not.

The downside to all of this is that it takes time. So it is with any hobby; the question is whether the rewards of the hobby – intrinsic, extrinsic, or a combination of the two – outweigh the cost in time. The year I took off from writing made clear to me that the intrinsic rewards of writing far outweigh the price in hours it demands. I am increasingly aware of the same truth in my approaches to photography and music composition – arts I enjoy deeply but to which I have not devoted sufficient time as to produce much content, much less masterful content. Worse, the more time I stay away, the less skillful I find myself.

As in running, those atrophied “muscles” are painfully frustrating at the beginning; they present a powerful incentive to continue working faithfully even when the process is difficult, or when time is cramped. The results of daily discipline are rarely visible in the short run, but the cost of a lack of discipline is always visible in the long run. So in 2012, I hope to exercise my creative muscles along with my physical muscles – come what may!