A Christmas Blessing

May the nativity of G-D has nested in your hearts

and that the miracle of Incarnation is manifest in your life this coming year!

FREE Copy of Coffeehouse Theology Study Guide!

I’m a huge fan of all things free. It’s not just because I’m a cheapskate; I think that offering substantial items of real value online is a good way for artists, musicians, and authors to connect with people who might be inspired by their work. I think that ultimately it’s economically viable, and I applaud publishing houses (like the newly-formed HarperStudio) who are taking ‘risks’ in this area to test out freemiums in our growing freeconomy.

This is why I’m so glad my friend Ed Cyzewski and the folks at NavPress are giving away the study guide to his uber-cool Coffeehouse Theology! I’ll leave you to Ed to learn the details from here…

Download a Free Bible Study PDF Today!During December and January my book Coffeehouse Theology: Reflecting on God in Everyday Life (about),will be available from NavPress.com at 35% off (coupon K82E1D8E6).

In light of this offer, starting today and ending at 7 pm EST on December 31st, the Coffeehouse Theology: Bible Study Guide (about) will be available as a free PDF for download. This guide, which complements Coffeehouse Theology, provides group/personal Bible studies under the guidance of a series of theologians, commentaries, and discussion questions.

There is a limit of one print out per person. Need more copies for your group? Then forward this message to your friends or place an order with NavPress. If you mention this offer on your web site or social media, please refer your readers to this page.

This offer ends December 31st at 7 PM EST.

Act Today for Another Free Book Download!

If you forward this e-mail to your friends by December 17th, you can visit this page and enter the caps locked password “FORWARD EMAIL” in order to download a free PDF of the Coffeehouse Theology Contemporary Issues Guide. This guide applies Coffeehouse Theology to a biblical examination of a number of today’s most pressing issues (about).

This offer ends December 17th at 7 PM EST, so act fast!

About the Bible Study Guide
A personal or group study guide that will help readers learn to study scripture with an awareness to their contexts and to the Christian voices from history and around the world.

For those who don’t know where to start with theology, The Bible Study Guide will provide a series of first steps that will assist individual and group study of scripture.

Order Physical Copies of the Study Guides
Both study guides are available for purchase at NavPress at 25% off and at bulk discounts.

Keep in Touch!

You can find my writing blog at www.edcyz.com and my theology blog at www.inamirrordimly.com. I’m also on Twitter and Facebook.

Another Morrell Makes The News…

It's hard to say who's being more theatrical...

No, not the Mike Morrell who’s running for Republican State Assembly in California (though him too)…but Jessie Morrell, “a 25-year-old evangelist preacher from Cheshire, Conn., who said he did three stints at the juvenile detention center on Whalley Avenue for selling drugs — says he knows where most Yale students are headed: hell. For the past three days, Morrell has used Yale’s campus as the platform for his open-air preaching. A self-proclaimed born-again Christian, he has spent much of the past three days sermonizing about the “evils of sin” on Old Campus, Cross Campus and the section of Wall Street near Woodbridge Hall…”

Full article here.

(HT: Zach Lind)

The Littlest Chiropractic Patient

– my daughter, at North Raleigh Chiropractic. Keep up with Dr. Joe on Twitter @drjoeharris.

Wanna Become A Mind-Controlling Cult Leader?

Who doesn’t? Ten years ago – in 1999 – I thought that civilization was going to collapse on January 1, 2000. Not for any divinely-mandated apocalyptic reasons, mind you; it was all about the ‘computer bug.’ Computers would think it was 1900 due to only having two digit-spaces for the year, and all heckfire would break loose. It was a great time in those days; folks from my church were stockpiling food & weapons. At school, my friend nicknamed me ‘Y2K’ and filmed a mock video of me recruiting for an apocalyptic Y2K cult on campus – that is, before I took a year off following the Fall 1998 semester to prepare for The Collapse. The name ‘Y2K’ stuck…I wonder why? I need to digitize that video sometime. Anyway, among this particular cadre of friends the reputation of “Mike the Cult Leader” has playfully stuck around (or maybe not-so-playfully in the case of my dear old friend Billy, who’s convinced that I’m spiritually & politically off the rails, and bound for cultic greatness), and so I tend to notice it when videos like this make the rounds (thanks, Brittian!)

“Don’t you want devoted followers who’ll leave their families for you, give their money, their body, and their mind to you, consider you God and kill for you? If yes…watch this preparatory video.”

Ahh…gotta love it. Say, I wonder if Pastor Mark or Pastor Perry have seen this?

Multitextured Future: Introduction to Causal Layered Analysis (CLA)

In my MSF program, we review all sorts of different theories of society & societal. These theories have direct implication on our theories and visions of the future. There are many different approaches in the futurist discipline; there are basic/gestalt theories, systems thinking theories, and more semiotic approaches. My favorite approach by far combines the strength of each of the aforementioned theories into a meta-theory/framework model called Causal Layered Analysis, or CLA. Developed by Sohail Inayatullah, CLA looks at the future from four interdependent layers. Quoth Wikipedia:

Causal layered analysis consists of four levels: the litany, social causes, discourse/world-view and myth/metaphor.

1. The first level is the litany – the official unquestioned view of reality.
2. The second level is the social causation level, the systemic perspective. The data of the litany is explained and questioned at this level.
3. The third level is the worldview/discourse. Deeper, unconsciously held ideological, worldview and discursive assumptions are unpacked at this level. The way in which different stakeholders construct the litany and system are also explored.
4. The fourth level is the myth-metaphor, the unconscious emotive dimensions of the issue. The challenge is to conduct research that moves up and down these layers of analysis and thus is inclusive of different ways of knowing. Doing so allows for the creation of authentic alternative futures and integrated transformation. CLA begins and ends by questioning the future.

Fun stuff, eh? Most American futures studies programs focus exclusively on the Litany and – at most – systemic levels. The schools of foresight developed out of Hawaii, Australia, Europe and Japan focus more on epistemes and intuitive inner/spiritual futures – almost like a wisdom school. (In fact, that’s exactly what Prout College is – and I mean that as a high compliment.) The Regent MSF program – and KedgeForward Consulting – combine the best of Southern Hemisphere-meets-west, empirical and intuitive, into what we hope is an AQAL approach to truly integral futures. Taking all quadrants of human and nonhuman experience into account – inner and external worlds, personal and social. Kedge On!

Ahem. Back to CLA. You can get lost for hours on Dr. Inayatullah’s insightful website Metafuture. In fact, I highly recommend doing so.

Blessings Not Just for the Ones Who Kneel – the Promiscuous Love of God

Want to read this post? I don’t blame you – it’s one of my finest. 🙂  But it’s been moved, to my new blog at MikeMorrell.org! Please update your subscriptions and bookmarks – we’d love to have you there!

Back On Facebook! (I Think)

Update 12/2: Some people are telling me that they can’t see my Profile link; that it’s saying ‘Page Not Found’ on Facebook. Please leave a comment below if you’re not seeing it. Trying to get to the bottom of this…

I’m back on Facebook – with new profiles. You can add me here or here – or, when in doubt, both. More on that in a moment.

So after all this time, hundreds of direct emails to Facebook from friends, and a Reactivate Mike Morrell’s Facebook Account! group on FB, I heard precisely nothing from the Powers that Be from America’s most popular social networking site. I tried creating a new profile with a different email address than the one associated with my disabled account, and my IP address was banned. I seemed to be backed into a corner with nowhere to go.

So I tried one more email to Marissa and company. It went like this:

Hi Marissa,

My apologies if some of my friends are getting agitated and venting their frustration. I know that you don’t make the rules – you only try to enforce them to the best of your ability. I’m wondering if you could get me in touch with someone who might have the ability to help me out. On November 14, my Facebook account (at http://facebook.com/zoecarnate) was disabled. It appears that some of my friends have written you to request its reinstatement. Many of them have received an email reply that included this:

“If you’re writing on behalf of a friend, please ask your friend to write to us directly, so that we can confirm their identity for account security purposes.”In the spirit of your request, I am writing you again to request that you please reinstate my Facebook profile as-is, or move the friends on my profile to my ‘fan’ Page (which has also been disabled, as I had no other administrator).Once again I’d like to appeal what triggered my deactivation. I know your time is very valuable, so I’ll be brief. On November 14, I messaged eight people I know. These eight people had been recommended by mutual friends of ours as people I should be friends with on Facebook. I could not add them directly, as for some reason my ability to add people has been disabled for nearly a year now. (My guess is because I was too close to the friend limit – I had around 4990 friends). Because I messaged these people ‘too quickly’ (I was saying essentially the same thing to all of them), I triggered your failsafe. Looking at the FAQ/appeal process however, I discovered that I engaged in none of the behavior that this failsafe is meant to prevent – I wasn’t spamming anyone, and I wasn’t sending unsolicited messages to strangers. I was contacting people I already know (in real life, actually) to invite them to connect. I had to do this with my own grandmother about a month previously. I would like my account reinstated because its how I keep in touch with thousands of people I care about. From my Facebook profile, friends and colleagues coordinate anti-human trafficking initiatives, plan sustainable food programmes, and discuss the news and books that are important to us. We would like our communication back. I’ve done nothing wrong; I haven’t violated the spirit of your guidelines.

If the larger issue is not this particular infraction, but your wariness of people having 5k friends, I understand your concern and would be willing to have these friends moved to my ‘fan’ Page, scaling my actual profile to more immediate friends and family. I will keep both updated frequently, so hopefully my existing Profile friends won’t feel they’re getting the short end of the stick.

I’m willing to do whatever it takes, and work with you in whatever way, to ensure that these misunderstandings won’t happen again. Please give me a call at (678) xxx-xxxx if you’d like to talk about this directly.

Thank you for your time,

Mike

—
Mike Morrell

http://twitter.com/zoecarnate

I wrote this several days ago, and have heard nothing from them about getting my original accounts back. And as I said, I couldn’t initiate any new accounts on my IP address. Thankfully, a friend who wishes to remain anonymous ‘jump-started’ a new account on my behalf and handed me the reins. This was a few days ago; I didn’t publicize my new account because part of me was wanting to wait and see if FB would disable it, too – but that’s probably just me over-personalizing what is in fact a very impersonal system. So, I’m back.

There are now two ways you can connect with me on Facebook:

My Page
My Profile

I’d like to make a request: You add me. Both times in the past when I’ve gotten in trouble with Facebook it’s when I’ve used legitimate Facebook features but did so ‘too fast.’ So while I probably could use their Friend Finder feature to re-connect with most of you in a matter of days, Facebook’s system interprets people adding at that volume as evil robot spammers. So if a thousand or so of you add me, I’m much less likely to trip up the system (and you won’t get in trouble for adding little ‘ol me). May I impose on your further? If you and I had a lot of friends and connections in common, would you post a link to my new Page/Profile (or better yet, this blog post) in your Feed so others I was connected with can know how to re-add me? And if you really have time to kill, please liberally use the Suggest a Friend feature that shows up when you add me, so that I can reconnect with the old gang. Whew! Digital connection is so arduous!

Another request, and I don’t even know how to ask this without sounding like a complete jerk: Since my Profile friends cue filled up so quickly the last time (I had 5k friends in about 18 months after joining Facebook), and I don’t want to even break 4,000 this time (because profiles just run a lot slower at that kind of volume, plus the FB system starts breathing down your neck), if its all the same to some of you, add me on my Page rather than my Profile. Pages can have twenty gazillion friends and, for whatever reason, they don’t slow down. I promise to update both Page & Profile with the same information, links, and zingers; hopefully, they’ll both have the same level of lively banter and conversation that you’ve come to expect. You will have equal access to me at both Page and Profile; it is only I who will have less access to you if we connect via my Page. (Maybe it’s best that I don’t see your drunken party pics anyway, eh?) And please know that if you add me on my Page, I won’t think of you as my ‘Fan’ – because that’s just silly. I hate, hate, hate that I even have to put this request out there – I really wish Facebook would allow for a united platform that allowed consenting adults to connect in any quantities, and in any way they wished, but alas – it’s just not that way right now. And please – when in doubt, just add me via my Profile. I don’t plan on turning anyone down as long as I’m under 4k friends. But really & truly, I’m going to be using my Page and Profile in the exact same way from now on.

One last request: If you don’t feel too cheesy doing it, add me via my Page even if you add me via my Profile. Because one huge advantage Pages have over Profiles is that I can message all of you in one fell swoop, in a way that won’t get my account disabled. I promise never to abuse this feature – if I message you once a month I’ll be surprised – but I’d like to be able to get in touch with you quickly if I find out about something really cool – like 12 free Christmas albums.

Wow. I feel ridiculously self-conscious talking about all of this. Hopefully this is the last time in a good lonnnnng time that you’ll hear me carrying on about my social networking activities. Because social networking, like 1950s children, are best seen (used) not not heard (about) – can I get an amen?

Okay – see you around Facebook, and elsewhere. Selah.