Orkut Needs Clear Migration Path to Google+ 09/06/2011
 For at least three years now the status on my Orkut profile has been a message in Portuguese stating that Facebook is far better than Orkut. As bad as the user experience is on Orkut, I'm surprised it's hung on as long as it has, essentially outliving MySpace despite virtually no visible development work to improve it or add functionality. The reason my status was in Portuguese was simply that the only contacts I have there are all Brazilian. Orkut, virtually unknown among Americans, has been the social network of choice for Brazilians for a few years. It would seem that is now changing.  According to recent numbers, Facebook now exceeds Orkut in total number of users in Brazil. Facebook has around 30 million users there, more than Orkut's 27 million. Click here for a translation of an article on these statistics. Personally, I've observed this shift taking place over the past year or so as Brazilian family members and friends have created profiles and friended me. It makes my life a little easier, consolidating all of my contacts into one location. This brings me to the suggestion in the title of this post. Google still wants to compete in the social networking arena, as evidenced by the creation of Google+. Orkut, a Google property, is visibly in decline. It seems only natural that Google should create a simple, prominently-displayed (on Orkut) migration tool from Orkut to Google+. Even better...let people who migrate keep their non-migrated Orkut friends, and vice versa. As Google+ improves (hopefully) and Orkut continues to be the static mess it has been for years, users will make the reasonable choice and shift over to greener pastures, staying in the Google fold at the same time. After all, I really believe the only reason Orkut held on as long as it did was because Brazilian users already had all of their friends there and were accustomed to the interface. If now they are beginning to weary of Orkut, how much easier would it be to stay where their friends are bug obtain a better experience? Just a thought. I'll be very interested to see what happens with Orkut, Google+ and Facebook over the coming months. UPDATE: There's now an option to share Orkut albums on Google+! It's not much, but it's a good first step. 9/30/2011  Add Comment Recommended Podcast: Talk 2 Brazil 08/31/2011
 Talk to Brazil bills itself as "the World's First and Only English Language RadioTalk Show on Business in Brazil." Featured live on LA Talk Radio, this program is fortunately also available for download. The host, Tom Reaoch, is a consultant and speaker with many years of experience in business in Brazil, where he still lives. If you are looking for interesting podcasts dealing with business and tech in Brazil, Talk 2 Brazil is a good place to start. It's the best (and only!) I've found of the genre so far. Wordpress and StumbleUpon Make News 08/30/2011
  In slightly less surprising news last week, Wordpress now powers 14.7% of the top million websites in the world. So I guess the two things to definitely have online these days are a Wordpress-powered site with a prominent StumbleUpon button! See Also: StumbleUpon Drives More Than 50% of Social Media Traffic [STATS] (Mashable) State of the Word (Wordpress News) WordPress powers 14.7 per cent of the top million web sites (The H)  Another interesting factoid about Peixe Urbano: They’ve imported a dozen American engineers, product managers and designers. It’s not outsourcing, and it’s not insourcing. It’s something unique, and you don’t hear about Non-U.S. startups hiring and moving Americans to wherever they are very often. Perhaps we’ll see more of this over time. The company has hired people from Apple, Intuit, Tagged, Merchant Circle and other companies. So if you’re an American techy and you want to get paid (including stock options) to go hang out in Brazil for a few years, you know where to send your resume. Brazil’s Peixe Urbano Takes “Significant Growth” Round From General Atlantic and Tiger Global (Techcrunch) Peixe Urbano is a Groupon-style daily deal website, and I've heard from several friends in Brazil about how much they love it. This and other web-based businesses could finally be coming into prominence in Brazil, as more and more homes are connecting to broadband. For the longest time those with any home internet connection at all were depending on dial-up service (remember the 1990s?), but lately that's been changing. Between my efforts to master Ruby on Rails, my experience in social media and my work as a site producer, I'm hopeful that I may be able to step in and help fill the gap for some Brazilian-based tech company in the not-too-distant future. See Also: Brazil's Boom Needs Talent (Barron's) Brazil Vows to Connect Internet to Most Households by 2014 (TMCnet) Much Ado About Mormons 08/09/2011
 Lately I've been hearing an upsurge in chatter about the Mormon faith. From the musical "The Book of Mormon" to NYC cabs bearing advertisements for mormon.org to a couple of blog posts and an article...there seems to be an interest in the topic at the moment. I'm sure it will pass again shortly, then come up again at some point in the future. I've long had a strong interest in the Mormon faith, since my first visit to Nauvoo, Illinois in my mid-teens. When I went to college I even intended to become a "missionary to the Mormons" after graduation. Fortunately, God had other plans for me. The Christian Chronicle has an article this month about "Ministry in Mormon country" that makes for interesting reading. It discusses the experience of a cappella Churches of Christ in Utah. More interesting than that, though, are two blog posts. The first, featuring Latayne Scott, is provided by the Christian Chronicle. Latayne is a former Mormon who is now a member of a Church of Christ. She has written on Mormonism and her reasons (and more) for leaving the Latter-day Saint Church. In the comments on this post she answers questions on Mormonism (read also the Christian Chronicle interview with her). The second, on Rachel Held Evan's blog, is a post with answers to questions received earlier for Jana, a convert to the LDS church who was actually studied at a Protestant theological seminary. I'll leave off further comment here, and welcome civil comments on the topic from readers. Shunning and Religious Freedom in Brazil 07/29/2011
 Brazil can be a challenging place to live, on so many levels. Taxes are high, bureaucracy seems endless, criminal activity is rampant, politicians are corrupt in ways few outsiders can easily imagine...it's tough. The nation's legislators frequently update and revise the national constitution, requiring a new edition to be published every year to keep people up-to-date. Some of that legislation really makes me wonder. What I don't know is if it's my basic sense of decency that's challenged in every case, or my American ideals. A case in point would be the recent action by the Federal Prosecutor in the state of Ceará against the Jehovah's Witnesses in Brazil. It would seem that the Jehovah's Witnesses practice a form of "shunning" against lapsed members. This isn't too uncommon among religious groups (conservative Mennonites and their Amish kin come to mind), but in modern times most forms of excommunication or disfellowshipping constitute little more than a revision of the church membership list and perhaps (and this is rare in my experience) a public announcement to the congregation. In my own fellowship of churches I've heard announcements to members to help specific individuals get back on track, but never a declaration of complete exclusion. That isn't to say it doesn't happen in Churches of Christ, because it does. It's just not that terribly common. So, I have three questions. But first I recommend that you read the article about this legal action in Brazil either in Portuguese or in a Google-translated English version. First, is "shunning" biblical and therefore justified at times? Examples would be nice. Second, is it ever acceptable for a government to dictate to religious bodies what they can teach in oral and/or written form? Again, examples please. Third, is it possible that this specific case is an example of the state being better and shooting higher than a religious body in moral or ethical terms? Evolving in Monkey Town (4) 07/23/2011
In "Evolving in Monkey Town," Rachel Held Evans describes being a student at an evangelical college when she saw footage of the execution of a woman by the Taliban in Afghanistan. She puts it this way: Suddenly abstract concepts about heaven and hell, election and free will, religious pluralism and exclusivism had a name: Zarmina. I felt like I could come to terms with Zarmina's suffering if it were restricted to this lifetime, if I knew that God would grant her some sort of justice after death. But the idea that this woman passed from agony to agony, from torture to torture, from a lifetime of pain and sadness to an eternity of pain and sadness, all because she had less information about the gospel than I did, seemed cruel, even sadistic. Arguments to the effect that we are all sinners deserving of hell make a lot less sense when we see the senseless death of people who have never had real access to the Gospel. The best I've ever heard is pretty pitiful. Something like, "Well, we don't know what opportunities she had to hear the Gospel." Perhaps, but we have a pretty good idea. Then there's the affirmation that this is what makes the missionary enterprise so important. Let's be realistic about this, my friends. Generations lived and died without the light of the Gospel in lands and times after the birth of the church. In many regions what arrived and called itself "church" was a far cry from the witness to the resurrection we see described in the New Testament. In our own day, many areas are legally closed to mission work, and the clandestine missions that go on do so in a niche environment, reaching relatively few. Then there are the children and others with limited mental faculties: "We just assume that little kids and mentally disabled people go to heaven," I said. "The Bible doesn't come right out and say that. So why can't we believe that people without the gospel go to heaven? What's the difference? Why won't anyone give me a straight answer on this?" Somehow it's affirmed that God is good enough to spare some from endless suffering, but not others. It all seems to an outsider's eye like damnation by technicality. My upbringing was in the Roman Catholic Church. I had a belief in God and Jesus, but it wasn't until I was 17 that I decided that I'd stake my faith and life on him. I prayed to Jesus that where he led, I would follow. At that time I didn't have any notion of baptism by immersion as part of becoming a disciple. A couple of years of true, heartfelt devotion and seeming communion with God came and went before I was presented with the biblical teaching on this topic. A real crisis of faith ensued, as I questioned everything I'd believed and thought I knew up to that point, and even began to see God in a very negative light. Rather than a merciful Savior, I saw him for a time as a wrathful Judge. The space between doubting God's goodness and doubting his existence is not as wide as you might think. I found myself crossing it often, as it didn't require much of a leap. I suppose it's similar to what happens to a person when she is betrayed by a loved one. At first, the bretrayed is angry because the betrayer has violated some sacred bond between them, some official or unofficial committment to love, friendship, or loyalty. But over time, the betrayed begins to wonder if that bond ever existed in the first place, if it was real or just in her imagination. That's how I felt about God. First I doubted that he is good; then I doubted that he is real. It seemed the teological argument in support of his existence was a lot less effective when I was unsure of his benevolence. I never realized how important hope is to belief. It was a hard month. I was baptized into Christ, but really only found peace after a visit home to the family farm. In the fields that weekend, with prayer and reflection, I simply decided that God is good and merciful. While continuing to embrace the truth that the promise of remission of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit is connected to faith, repentance and immersion in water, I also believed that God is patient and loving. Over the years, though, I slipped further into the negative line of thought and became exclusive to the point of toxicity in my faith. Only in the recent few years have I found myself into something I think is closer to the thought of the early church, as found in Scripture. In reality, the hope we have is both for this life and for the next. In Acts, Paul is recorded as having declared that he was being judged for his hope in the resurrection of the dead. In Romans 6 he affirmed that through baptism we are raised to walk in newness of life. In 1 Corinthians 15 he says that if it is only in this life that we have hoped in Christ, we are above all people most to be pitied. Our hope is for new life now and resurrected life in the future. The Christian faith isn't all about believing all the right things now so we can go to heaven later. It's about living for Christ now and being resurrected through him later. What does God do with children, the mentally disabled, those who have never heard of Christ and those who have heard of Christ but were never presented with the truth about baptism? I believe God is better, greater, more merciful and loving than those questions. Evolving in Monkey Town (3) 07/21/2011
"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous, and you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ Thus you testify against yourselves that you are descendants of those who murdered the prophets." - Matthew 23:29-31 NRSV We would all like to believe that had we lived in the days of the early church or the Protestant Reformation, we would have chosen the side of truth, but in nearly every case, this would have required a deep questioning of the fundamental teachings of the time. It would have required a willingness to change. We must be wary of imitating the Pharisees, who bragged that had they lived during the time of the prophets, they would have protected the innocent (see Matt. 23:30), but who then plotted against Jesus and persecuted his disciples. - EMT, pp 20-21 Christians often chuckle at how long it took the disciples of Jesus to catch on to what he was doing, and we shake our heads and grumble about the conspiracy of the religious and political leaders against Jesus. We have, however, the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. In actual fact, the challenge of accepting Jesus is far greater than a warm religious experience, a renewed sense of piety or an improved outlook on life. Following Jesus means embracing a complete change from the status quo. Embracing hope means not only rejecting despair, but setting out into unknown territory and doing things we never imagined we'd do, all for the sake of the One who called us. So many believers in Christ in the American South and Midwest think they have it all figured out. I know I did. Right Bible versions, right doctrines, right worship style (and all very hotly debated in certain circles). Well-fed and comfortable, there's time and energy to try to sort through the Bible and strain at gnats while swallowing camels. That's not to say there's no value in Bible study. Clearly I think there is, else why do I bother doing it myself and even blog and write studies about the Bible? The trouble comes when we (and by that I truly mean "me" as well) start thinking we have it all figured out, and then God does something different. How much do we miss because we've defined God's truth so narrowly that we can't see the big picture any longer? Of course, the greatest danger of all is that of becoming the ones who cast stones at those who are doing the work of God. Evolving in Monkey Town (2) 07/20/2011
In my previous post I indicated that I couldn't fully relate to Rachel Held Evans' experiences growing up evangelical, as that was not my background. In fact, I really only considered myself "evangelical" for a few years after leaving the Roman Catholic Church. Once I became part of the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement, I didn't see myself as evangelical any longer, although it could be argued that this movement is "evangelical" in nature, despite the distinctions. I really can identify strongly with at least part of Rachel's journey: the trip out of certainty through doubt into faith. My perspective from the time of leaving the Roman Catholic Church on for years became more and more like what Rachel describes in "Evolving in Monkey Town"(EMT). I figured that if I read the Bible enough and learned all of the right arguments, my faith would be secure and I'd be able to win others over. Even ideas like 6-day creationism could be defended, I figured, if I just knew the "right" answers. I found ample "proof" that this was right from my own experience...or so I thought. Once, early in my college career, while working at a convenience store I got to know a regular customer who was part of a local sect that used the King James Version and had some pretty strange beliefs. He wanted to study the Bible with me, so we scheduled a day. I was completely unprepared. He was throwing odd concepts at me from isolated passages of Scripture, and in the end I felt all I could do was give my testimony. He was unimpressed. A few years later, shortly after completing my Bachelor of Ministry through Harding University, a Jehovah's Witness came to my parents' door while I was there over Christmas. For every topic he attempted to discuss, I had an answer, all the way to chapter and verse. He was visibly unsettled by the end of the exchange, which I managed to keep friendly, and he excused himself. I felt as though my time and dedication in study was proven worthwhile. Looking back, I now have no regrets for having studied for ministry (though I have often regretted it over the years, particularly when I needed gainful employment outside of ministry to support my family). I also still feel pretty good about the chat that day with the Jehovah's Witness. The trouble is that I had learned only how to win arguments, not how to make friends or call people to discipleship. Mostly, I didn't learn how to be a real Christian. At the core of all of that study, I believe, was an element of fear. This came into the light years later as a ministry in New Mexico with a struggling and somewhat abusive church came crashing down around me. Through that experience and the subsequent years of recovery in New Jersey I began to see that all of my line-drawing and contending for the faith was an attempt to somehow justify and protect the idolatrous notion of God's doctrine that I had formulated. The problem with fundamentalism is that it can't adapt to change. When you count each of your beliefs as absolutely essential, change is never an option. When change is never an option, you have to hope that the world stays exactly how it is so as not to mess with your view of it. I think this explains why some of the preachers on TV look so frantic and angry. For fundamentalists, Christianity sits perpetually on the precipice of doom, one scientific discovery or cultural shift or difficult theological question away from extinction. So fearful of losing their grip on faith, they squeeze the life out of it. - EMT, pg 18 This was precisely how I felt, although I wouldn't have necessarily put it that way. I organized a short-lived non-profit called "Ancient Faith Ministries" and began trying to build a coalition of "faithful" ministers and congregations within the independent Christian Churches/Churches of Christ. My problem wasn't just with the world, but with other Christians as well. Panic and despair became frequent companions. In the aftermath of my toxic faith, one of my earliest realizations was that I'd made a particular viewpoint into an idol. In reality, I'd been doing worse than that. I had been treating God Himself like an idol that needed to be defended. The God I know through Scripture is the Living God, mighty and powerful. He does not need me to defend him. In 1 Peter 3:15 Christians are told to be ready to give an answer or "defend" their faith. This is largely taken to mean that we need to train in all of the "right" apologetic questions and answers. Although I see some value in this still, a closer look at the passage in question might be useful. Look it up yourself. Notice what we're really supposed to give an accounting of to those who ask? It's our hope. Our hope in this life and our hope for resurrection through Jesus. Think about it. Evolving in Monkey Town (1) 07/19/2011
 What you're seeing here wasn't supposed to happen. Perhaps two years ago or more I decided not to blog any longer on a daily basis. The only exception is my Tumblr blog, and it hardly counts. Daily blogging takes a lot of time, thought and energy, all of which I need for my family, ministry (such as it is at this point) and job. I've read some pretty substantial theological works and never had a problem doing a one-off book review for each. With Rachel Held Evans' "Evolving in Monkey Town" (EMT) though, I'm going to have to open a pretty big exception. It took no more than two days for me to breeze through EMT, but I underlined or bracketed so many paragraphs that it became clear pretty quickly than more than one post would be needed to explore some of the thoughts. What Rachel describes in her memoir (so odd for someone younger than me to have a "memoir") is her life growing up in a small town with a stable family, her father being a theology professor. She was raised evangelical, and what she describes sounds pretty idyllic. It was towards the end of her time studying at Bryan College that cracks began to show in her personal evangelical facade. The answers she'd been trained with only raised more questions, or else failed to answer the real questions she was beginning to encounter. She went from certainty to doubt, and the remainder of her story is of her journey from doubt to faith. Two points I'd like to make in this first post: First, I cannot fully relate to Rachel's experience. Though I was raised in a stable, two parent home in a rural area, my father claimed no religious affiliation and my mother was (and still is) Roman Catholic. I was raised going to Mass every Sunday (and "Holy Day of Obligation"). I had my first communion when I was 8 or 9, and was in the early stages of preparing for Confirmation in my late teens when I left the Roman Catholic Church. My parents had a subscription to National Geographic and I knew all about the theory of evolution from my earliest days in grade school. It wasn't until after I left the Catholic Church and began to identify myself as "evangelical" that I felt the need to side with "creationism." This uneasy situation ended only a few years ago. In essence, I'm saying I wasn't raised evangelical and so can't say I identify fully with what Rachel described. I can understand it, though. Second, here's the part I always detest hearing people say, but I'll write it anyway...the fact that I appreciate Rachel and what she wrote does not mean that I agree with all of her conclusions...where she reaches any. Over the next several days I'll post a paragraph or two from EMT, along with some of my own thoughts. You might as well buy a copy yourself. It only costs $6 in paperback from Amazon.com. | 
Adam Gonnerman - Former missionary, ESL teacher, customer service rep, social media manager and web producer; currently employed as a project manager in New York and volunteering through HOPE worldwide.
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