Charles Colson sounds off about praise music

Charles Colson writes in Christianity Today a pointed critique of today’s praise music, with a special level of disgust for MHCC favorite “Draw Me Close”. Is he an old fuddy duddy who hasn’t learned to worship a loving Father from the heart, or a sharp-minded cultural critic making a needed appeal for a stronger evangelical mind? Maybe both. Every era of church music has its share of wheat and chaff. “In the Garden” was the feel-good hymn of a couple of generations ago. I still don’t know what it means (do you?). The fact is that “Draw Me Close” expresses emotions you’ll find in the Psalms.

Colson is also disgusted that his radio talk segments are being pulled by Christian stations in favor of an “all music all the time” format. Colson sees this as a case of trading intellectual growth for emotional cotton candy. I haven’t heard Colson in years, so I don’t know if the reason could be that he has lost some of his appeal. His writing is still good, but he has used a co-writer for many years. In any case, he’s probably right about Christian stations going “Christian-lite”. Radio in general has been plain vanilla for years, and the Christian stations are among the last to have both music and talk in significant amounts on the same station.

Anyway, Colson sees in all this a sign of the dumbing-down of evangelicalism, which may be too convenient a scapegoat. If the level of discourse on the MHCC discussion board is any indication, he may be wrong. What do you think?

Read a good counterpoint to Colson’s take on praise music here.

April 6, 2006 · Filed Under Web

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Breaking new ground with audio and photos

I recently heard of two web services that seem to represent a giant leap forward for internet technology. The first is Podzinger, which uses sophisticated speech-recognition to read spoken-word content and make it searchable. Let’s say you were driving home last week and you remember hearing Samuel L. Jackson talking about his upcoming movie Snakes on a Plane. You’d like to find that interview, so you head over to Podzinger and type:

NPR samuel jackson snakes on a plane

That search takes you here, where the NPR story is the second one on the page (NPR Movies), and if you look at the text (which isn’t 100 percent accurate) you can easily see that the relevant conversation begins at 25:48. You can click the icon next to it and begin listening at that very point.

Podzinger does for audio and video what Google does for text (and if it does well, I’m confident that Podzinger will soon be part of Google or Yahoo).

If you’re interested in the technical aspects of Podzinger, you can listen to that here.

The other groundbreaking service is Riya, a place to store your photos. That’s been done before, but get this: Once you upload enough of your pictures and train Riya, it uses facial recognition technology to identify the people in your photos and make them searchable. If you have a couple thousand pictures on Riya, it can find the 25 of Uncle Fred. It can also read text within photos too (on signs, etc.)

April 4, 2006 · Filed Under Web

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April fools

Rather than coming up with my own April Fool’s joke, I thought I’d refer you to Wired’s top ten internet spoofs. You’ll recognize some of these as email legends that date back to the mid-90s. A few of them I’d never heard of.

April 1, 2006 · Filed Under Web

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