L'Abri wrap up:

Instead of giving an outline for each talk I went to (10 total), I'm going to do it "what I'm learning in class" style and give the bullet points for the stuff that I thought was mind-blowing, confusing, or had to look up later. Oh, and most of these points are what I got from the talks, not necessarily what they were trying to put across (I had to put in the postmodern subjective justification on this, sorry)

Jerram Barrs: "Common Grace: the general kindness of God"
- Gerard Manley Hopkins: "God's Grandeur"
- common grace makes people even more inexcusable in their suppression of the truth about God. (whoa.)
- human failure speaks to God's glory by contrast (interesting)

Richard Winter: "Sex: Agony and Ecstasy"
- sex in the beginning is like learning to dance, you step all over each others toes at first
- men and women: Vive la Différence!
- Lisa McMinn: "Sexuality and Holy Longing: embracing intimacy in a broken world"
- Proverbs 6:26 - "for the prostitute reduces you to a loaf of bread, and the adulteress preys upon your very life." - we can treat each other like objects when having sex.

Hans Bayer: "Spirituality in Contemporary Culture"
- definition of culture: what men and women value and deem 'good.' (fascinating)
- I would like to do a study on the 'solutions' in movies, because I think this speaks to the culture at that time, what is accepted as a resolution to a problem?
- the contemporary man has no cause to sacrifice his life for.
- postmodern community is built around actions, not talk. talk leads to division, while action leads to a utopian society of progress and diversity.
- there is transcendence through self-exposure in Facebook. Once it's all out there I will be able to figure it out. It's also navel-gazing (I love that term).

David Richter: "Modern Piracy: the ethics of file sharing"
- there is a whole anti-DRM (digital rights management) movement out there (Defective by Design site)
- the government and record companies are trying to get colleges to police file sharing: CNET news "Colleges must police copyright, or else" - which is extremely expensive and just not their job.
- Spiral Frog - a new type of music website that requires a monthly renewal fee? and covers some of the cost for the music by ads and customer surveys.
- THEY'RE THINKING ABOUT BUILDING A NEW INTERNET??? I'm still trying to figure this one out, but the NSF (national science foundation) - who invented the original internet (yeah, yours) for scientists to share info - are thinking about building a new internet with more safety regulations. Is it 1984 already? some articles: (BBC "Internet's future in 2020 debated", Wired "Old Hands Give Internet2 a Helping Hand", NSF - GENI, more to come...) It's pathetic that I haven't heard about this - all the articles I'm finding are from like 2005.
- Wired and Jeff Tweedy from the talk "Music is not a loaf of bread"

...more to come, must head off to Chipotle.