Merianna and Sam discuss church schedules, life of the pastor's spouse, missing Sunday morning worship, Micah 6:8, and high church baptists.
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Month: January 2020
Episode 158: We Don’t Talk About That in Church
This week, Revs. Merianna Neely Harrelson and Sam Harrelson discuss canonization, the politics of commentaries, Jonah's Whale, interpretation history, Doomsday Clock, Harrowing of Hell, and masturbation lessons from Sunday School.
Links:
- Did Jonah Really Get Swallowed by a Whale? | The Institute for Creation Research — Yikes… quite the hot take here (spoiler: no, it wasn’t a whale in the text).
- Doomsday Clock – Wikipedia
- Biblical hermeneutics – Wikipedia
- Harrowing Of Hell
- What Does the Bible Say about Masturbation? — Yikes… “In a sense, it becomes a substitute god.”
- Masturbation in the Bible – Scripture Quotes about it’s Sinfulness — In case you wanted to prooftext it…
- 5 Biblical Ways to Overcome Masturbation | ApplyGodsWord.com — No words…
- Sex and the American Teenager: Seeing through the Myths and Confronting the … – R. Murray Thomas – Google Books
Google’s Ads Updates in Search Results
We manage a number of Google Ads campaigns for clients. We’ve definitely noticed an uptick in desktop CTR’s since the updates (same as what happened with mobile last year). But a Google Ads campaign is only as good as the conversions it drives. If the quality tanks b/c of more junk clicks, ad spends will go elsewhere. All that to say, I don’t view this as cynically as the article here states:
Last week, Google began rolling out a new look for its search results on desktop, which blurs the line between organic search results and the ads that sit above them. In what appears to be something of a purposeful dark pattern, the only thing differentiating ads and search results is a small black-and-white “Ad” icon next to the former. It’s been formatted to resemble the new favicons that now appear next to the search results you care about. Early data collected by Digiday suggests that the changes may already be causing people to click on more ads.
Source: Google’s ads just look like search results now – The Verge
“The Next Day” Sermon
Bonus episode here as the main show will be coming out a little later this week. This is audio from Sam's sermon on John 1:29-42 this past Sunday at Garden of Grace UCC in Columbia, SC about sin, community, identity, and why he started going to church.
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Episode 157: Talking To Our Younger Selves about Religion
Sam is joined by The Rev. Merianna Neely Harrelson to discuss how she approaches Acts in church Bible studies, canonization, ascension vs resurrection vs transfiguration, the problem with a seminary education, and 4 listener questions.
Music from https://filmmusic.io
"Ancient Rite" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Links:
Episode 156: You Miss 100% Of The Shots You Don’t Take – Wayne Gretzky – Michael Scott
Sam is joined by Matthew Klippenstein this week to discuss fracturing of denominations, late dating of biblical texts, what an American has to learn from a Canadian, why the Dalai Lama might want to consider the lilies, and why ACTS might be the best book in the New Testament.
Special Guest: Matthew Klippenstein.
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On Aliens
Aliens exist, there’s no two ways about it. There are so many billions of stars out there in the universe that there must be all sorts of different forms of life. Will they be like you and me, made up of carbon and nitrogen? Maybe not. It’s possible they’re here right now and we simply can’t see them
— Read on www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/jan/05/astronaut-helen-sharman-this-much-i-know
Top Posts of the Teens
I started writing email newsletters in 2002 and blogging in 2003 for a couple of marketing outlets. I was mowing the lawn on October 13, 2006, and had the bright idea to start a marketing blog called CostPerNews. It took off rather quickly and before I knew it, I was getting citations on Techmeme and flown around to speak at various marketing and tech conferences. Part of that adventure was luck and hitting the blogging scene at just the right moment and part of it was the time and energy it took to write 3-5 posts a day about the various aspects of marketing I was covering.
Around that same time, I decided to use this samharrelson.com domain for my personal blog to journal and capture ideas and observations. Of course, it never had the same impact as CostPerNews, but it does continue to draw a not-insignificant amount of traffic each month.
Things really changed in the early 2010s as we moved from blogs to “social” media. I championed Twitter heavily back in 2006-2008 as an addition to what blogs had become and thought the platform would continue to amplify self-hosted personal sites and become a real discovery engine. What I hoped for is that personal and business blogs would bloom and platforms such as Twitter, Tumblr (RIP), and Facebook would be traffic drivers to those destinations. Boy, was I wrong. Worse, I gave in and started using those sites instead of this space for my personal thoughts and observations. You can see that in the chart above that shows the number of posts I’ve made here since 2006.
I’ve always had grand thoughts of doing away with my Twitter and Facebook accounts as primary places of content production and focusing here.
I’m taking that seriously in 2020. I’m not abandoning FB or Twitter (as I did Instagram last year), but I am using this as my primary hub.
On that note, let’s take a look back at the Top 10 posts from 2010-2020 here on the blog based on site traffic:
- What Is a High Church Baptist? (March 2, 2009) Though technically before 2010, this decade-old post continues to be a big page view generator.
- Apple’s iOS Home Screen Problem (January 25, 2016): Still true.
- Our AI-Assisted (Near) Future (July 2, 2016): Missed this prediction by a few years but still believe.
- NASA Receives Response from Voyager 1 (March 31, 2018): This one made the front page of Reddit and blew up.
- Google To Start Marking Sites Without HTTPS as Not Secure in July (June 26, 2018)
- Nexus 4 and Porting My Number to Google Voice (February 2, 2013): I still love that Nexus 4. Great device.
- iPad Pro is the New Mac (June 23, 2016): iPadOS makes this even truer almost 4 years later.
- The Golden Age of Apps are Over – Messengers Will Rule (February 10, 2016): I wrote this at a church picnic while grilling hotdogs in the back of my truck. I was a few years early but still think it’ll happen.
- Why augmented reality’s future is more practical and rational than you realize (July 17, 2016): Obviously I thought Pokemon Go was a harbinger of things to come.
- Of Siri and Hesiod (March 14, 2016): I love posts that combine new tech with ancient tech.
It looks like 2016 was definitely a bright spot for the blog here. I had made a concerted effort to stop giving so much content to the advertising-driven social networks and remind myself that I had space here that needed me. As I look back on the last 10 years and thousands of posts, I’m equally reminded of that realization. And excited.
It’s good to be back. Let’s see if we can do 1,000 here in 2020.