As I read “Outlive,” of course I thought about my own health. But I also recognized the parallels to what we are doing at Azura. Philanthropy began, like medicine, from a place of noble intentions: to make the world a better place. Early philanthropy 1.0 would see social problems and guess as to the best way to solve them. Usually this meant throwing money at the problem. The results were mixed.

In the last couple of weeks, I watched two documentary series that should have come with a trigger warning. I told someone close to me who did not grow up in an Evangelical world – if you want to understand the first 20 years of my life, watch “Shiny, Happy People.” If you want to understand the next 20 to 30 years, watch, “The Secrets of Hillsong.”

Having had some distance from Evangelicalism, one of the things that boggles my mind more than anything else is the way Evangelicals position themselves to the world around them. Last week, in response to the passing of the “Respect for Marriage Act”, Franklin Graham tweeted the following:

When she was in the second grade, my sister came home from school agitated. Apparently, her teacher tried to pull a fast one on the class. But my sister had an advantage over most of her classmates. She had two older brothers who had played on her gullibility so many times that she knew a fast line when she saw it.

“After the engineers, inventors, and scientists, after all such control through knowledge, ‘finally comes the poet.’ The poet does not come to have a say until the human community has engaged in its best management. Then perchance comes the power of poetry – shattering, evocative speech that breaks fixed conclusions and presses us always toward new, dangerous, imaginative possibilities.”

(Walter Brueggemann, “Finally Comes the Poet”)

Last week I read the New York Times interview with Jon Stewart. I miss Jon Stewart for a lot of reasons but probably none more than his ability to cut through the noise to the heart of an issue – often while playing the role of court jester.

What has stuck in my mind for the last few days is the following quote:

The other night I watched the Netflix documentary “The Great Hack.” It was both a fascinating and disturbing look at how Cambridge Anayltica weaponized the enormous amount of data that is available for everyone in the US in order to swing the US election in 2016…

I’m on Pete Buttigieg’s email list. A couple weeks ago, he sent out his “Rules of the Road” that outline the values for which his campaign is aspiring. Like most of Mayor Pete’s writings, it is well thought out and articulated. In fact, I thought it would be a great set of values for a faith-based organization to espouse. So, I stole it and re-framed his “Rules of the Road” for a church context…

My good friend Tom Oord made this crowdsourcing post on Facebook earlier this week, “Movie Fans: I need your help. In my current book, I'm making the argument that movies can help us feel God's loving presence. I'd like to list examples. What films have been the means by which you felt God's love?”

For the last 15 years or so, I’ve done an annual series of sermons called, “God in the Movies” in which I look at spiritual themes in popular movies. So, yesterday I looked back over some of my notes, got a little too OCD, and wrote this response to Tom…

I’ve had the rare privilege of naming two churches in my lifetime and I can tell you it is a lot harder than it looks. It may be harder than naming children. So, I’ve been an interested observer in how church names have changed over the years. In fact, you can tell the date range that a church was founded based on the kind of name it has. If you are uncertain as to how old your church is, you can use the handy, dandy table below to locate your church and find out what kind of names were all the rage when your church was named: