“It is not Christianity”

Interesting piece from the Sr. Editor of The American Conservative Rod Dreher (also a big fan of St. Benedict).

The rapid erosion of American Christianity is a reality that sincere “Church Going People” (as we call them here in SC) need to accept. I personally believe it’s a societal net-positive to have a large number of Americans get out of bed, put on dress clothes, and hear a good sermon that tells them to love another and that they are not the center of the universe once-a-week. That’s not the reality of many / most churches of course… but I do like to romanticize the Sunday morning experience. We can’t pretend that’s the norm in 2017 and beyond and that our young people and young families will eventually go back to church any more than we can hope that they will find the joy of telephone landlines in the near future.

Whatever “comes next” after American Christianity will be shocking, “not normal” and “not my type of church” if the Age of Trump is any inkling…

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is a pseudoreligion that jettisons the doctrines of historical biblical Christianity and replaces them with feel-good, vaguely spiritual nostrums. In M.T.D., the highest goal of the religious life is being happy and feeling good about oneself. It’s the perfect religion for a self-centered, consumerist culture. But it is not Christianity.

via Trump Can’t Save American Christianity – The New York Times

 

Nerd Post on Firewalls

We work on a lot of websites built on WordPress at Harrelson Agency.

Some of those are complicated builds that cost tens of thousands of dollars and require constant maintenance. Some of those are relatively static sites for a non-profit or small business built on a shoestring budget of just a few hundred dollars. What all of the sites we build have in common is a firewall (we use Wordfence a great deal but also have other means and normally work at the endpoint).

What I’ve found in all my years of marketing and business consulting is that web security is so overlooked by companies, churches, and non-profits large and small. WordPress powers a ton of websites out there, and as a result is frequently a vector of attack and hacking attempts. Make sure your web devs / “tech people” or neighborhood kid that you hire to build or work on your site knows at least a little about infosec and opsec or you’ll be paying for your budget-built website eventually.

Here’s a nerdy, but interesting, post from Wordfence on what makes them different from cloud-based firewalls…

When choosing a firewall for your WordPress website to protect it against attacks, you have a handful of choices. Wordfence is one of the only effective “endpoint” firewalls available. The alternative is a “cloud” firewall from vendors like Sucuri (now owned by GoDaddy) and Cloudflare.

via Why Choose An Endpoint Firewall Like Wordfence