Peripatetikos

At a recent clergy conference, I got my first exposure to PowerPoint, the new "slideware" program.

PowerPoint is said to be the world's most popular tool for presenting information, some 400 million copies in circulation. Almost no corporate decision takes place without it. But there's a claim now that the device only makes us stupider, that it briefs data to the point of incoherence.

The Secretary of State used it to convince the United Nations about the existence of the nonexistent WMD. Perhaps PowerPoint is uniquely suited to our modern age of obfuscation, where manipulating facts is as important as presenting them clearly.

If you have nothing to say, maybe you need just the right tool to help you not say it. That clears up a lot about this conference I just attended. The leader's resume is rubber-stamped all over with AAC. The pitch was to convince us otherwise. It wasn't so hard to get the PowerPoint.

Middle East peace activist and Episcopal lay leader Mary Page Jones has founded an unique organization called "Rag Dolls 2 Love, Inc," which seeks to place cloth dolls into the hands of children under the age of six who are victims of war. Check out http://www.ragdolls2love.org.

Saint Gregory the Great, Bishop of Rome and Servant of the Servants of God, is a model of clarity of vision mixed with tolerance. He allowed for variation in local custom, as long as it built up the church. He liked self-starters, had little patience with foot-draggers or prima donnas, yet he strove always to rule with love rather than power. His book On Pastoral Care was given to bishops at their consecrations and not without reason.

DGBly, girl singer, writes that Beatrice of Nazareth, in the XII Beguine, said, "And like the fish, swimming in the vast sea and resting in its deeps, and like the bird boldly mounting high in the sky, so the soul feels its spirit freely moving through the vastness and the depth and the unutterable richnesses of love."

Twenty-nine percent of Baptists and thirty-four percent of nondenominational Christians have a higher rate of divorce than atheists and agnostics (21%) according to the Barna Research Group which tracks this sort of stuff. America's marriage stronghold, ironically, is the liberal Northeast, where only nineteen percent of marriages end in divorce.

Covenant's new website may be reached at www.covenant-journal.orgOut of Nowhere is archived, as well. Tell us what you think about all this and whether you'd like it to replace this hard-copy version. You can reach us at cjed@covenant-journal.org. -- JLD

[COVENANT, Number 17, June 2004]