I have been writing album reviews a side hobby for ten years now. 2021 was far and away the weirdest of those years, with more late releases in September onward than the rest of the year up to that point. The whiplash between the pandemic-induced drought of most of 2021 and the recent firehose of … Continue reading Top 10 of 2021: Honorable Mentions
Author: Austin Gravley
SA-6: Distorted Beyond the Funhouse Mirror
https://youtu.be/ZTuHf409syw When you stand in front of a funhouse mirror, your image in distorted in some bizarre and unusual way. Whether you get huge legs or a giant head, you know a funhouse mirror is not meant to give you a true reflection of yourself the way a normal mirror does. But what happens when … Continue reading SA-6: Distorted Beyond the Funhouse Mirror
SA-5: Stepping on the Glass of Broken Echo Chambers
https://youtu.be/8842EvXCkOY Political polarization and tribalism are on the rise, and social media appears to be the chief culprit. The ability to customize our social media feeds to only hear the voices we want to hear has lead us into echo chambers of increasingly one-sided viewpoints and unchecked misinformation - at least, that's what cultural wisdom … Continue reading SA-5: Stepping on the Glass of Broken Echo Chambers
SA-4: Should Christians Leave Social Media? A Conversation About Digital Babylon
https://youtu.be/4LT7ULycsYM The Bible gives us a framework for understanding and navigating a world dominated by social media: Christians are to live as faithfully obedient exiles in the midst of Digital Babylon. This is the claim we explored on the prior episode of Breaking the Digital Spell, and we ended the episode open to pushback or … Continue reading SA-4: Should Christians Leave Social Media? A Conversation About Digital Babylon
SA-3: On Esther, Daniel, and Exile in Digital Babylon Manuscript
(This is the unedited manuscript for "SA-3: "On Esther, Daniel, and Exile in Digital Babylon", which was released on 9/27/21. Like all the other manuscripts I've published, it does not contain off-the-cuff additions or spontaneous changes in wording/phrasing during recording. You can listen to this episode wherever you get your podcasts or download the episode … Continue reading SA-3: On Esther, Daniel, and Exile in Digital Babylon Manuscript
SA-2: On Students and Brett McCracken’s “The Wisdom Pyramid”
Media literacy is the biggest gaping hole in our discipleship. We can feel its effects in our churches and our lives in the same way we can feel the effects of poor financial stewardship or failing marriages in our churches. Plenty of courses and programs exist for churches to address financial literacy and building healthy … Continue reading SA-2: On Students and Brett McCracken’s “The Wisdom Pyramid”
SA-1: The Asterisk Year (w/Manuscript)
When 2020 began, none of us factored in the possibility of a pandemic being the defining reality of our year. Our plans and predictions for the world were thrown into chaos, and our sense of "normal" upended overnight as we embraced a strong sense of uncertainty about our future. But how "normal" was our pre-pandemic … Continue reading SA-1: The Asterisk Year (w/Manuscript)
In (Glowing) Praise of “Passages: Nicaea” by Mere Orthodoxy
In 2019, I began my studies at Reformed Theological Seminary in pursuit of a Masters of Arts of Biblical Studies. I had been told by fellow students that an easy class to dip my toes into would be the first of two required Church History courses, and by the time I finished the first course … Continue reading In (Glowing) Praise of “Passages: Nicaea” by Mere Orthodoxy
When One Part Hurts, the Whole Body Is Sick (and Vice Versa): The SBC and the church catholic
One of the most essential and non-negotiable beliefs for a Christian is that we confess, as the Nicene Creed instructs us and Christians have done since the New Testament, that "we believe in one holy catholic [Latin for "whole" or "universal"] and apostolic church". Just as there was one singular and collective people of God … Continue reading When One Part Hurts, the Whole Body Is Sick (and Vice Versa): The SBC and the church catholic
When Prayer Becomes Data and Dollars
Gizmodo.com recently reported that Facebook is slowly unrolling the ability for Facebook groups to allow for prayer requests from its users. If a group decides to opt-in, users will have the ability to create posts as prayer requests, which in turn enables other uses to respond by hitting the "pray" button to indicate they've prayed … Continue reading When Prayer Becomes Data and Dollars
That Gravley Guy 