Scrolling around...July 29, 2013

An online college revolution is coming
If you care about college costs and educational quality, you should care about MOOCs, or “massive open online courses,” which deliver college courses digitally and just might revolutionize higher education. With MOOCs, a lecture course that draws a couple hundred students on campus can be converted to something that draws tens of thousands from around the globe. A seminar for 40 on campus can be reorganized to teach 800 when each on-campus student is deputized to be a virtual seminar leader for 20.

Whether for good or ill, MOOCs augur a disruption of the relationships among students, colleges and trade schools, and the credentials those schools offer — a relationship that has stabilized higher education for at least a century. Yet if done right — a big if, as recent events at San Jose State and Colorado State universities have shown — they may help address the quality and cost of higher education...

Sebelius recruits women to blog about health law
President Barack Obama's administration is courting female bloggers to play a role in a massive campaign aimed at informing the public about the benefits of the new health care law.

Over breakfast at a blogging conference Thursday in Chicago, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius asked a banquet hall full of bloggers - most of them women - to help spread the word about new health insurance opportunities that begin this fall under the Affordable Care Act...

MERS virus may be deadlier than SARS, study finds
The new respiratory virus that emerged in the Middle East last year appears to make people sicker faster than SARS, but doesn't seem to spread as easily, according to the latest detailed look at about four dozen cases in Saudi Arabia...


To See Ourselves as Others See Us
What do your non-Christian friends and family think of your faith? How do they see you? Does that response differ at all from how they felt just five or ten years ago?

It's hard to dispute that American culture is growing more hostile to Christianity. One proper response is to recognize that it's normal: Jesus told us that in this world we would have trouble (Jn. 16:33). And countless brothers and sisters around the world and throughout history have experienced not just a cultural tide turning against them, but even floods of opposition and persecution.

Yet what is normal for most Christians certainly doesn't feel normal to us. Given how the ground is shifting underfoot, I'd suggest that Robert Louis Wilken's book The Christians as the Romans Saw Them can shed a little light on our situation.

As we hear increasingly heated censures of the sharper edges of our beliefs and practice, it's worth listening to what some astute pagan observers thought about Christianity in its early days. How do ancient critiques stack up to today's challenges to the faith?..

The Surprising Countries Most Missionaries Are Sent From and Go To   A new study reveals how the missions field continues to become increasingly global—in some surprising ways. One example: South Korea has lost its No. 2 sending spot to four unlikely contenders.

The Center for the Study of Global Christian (CSGC) at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary calculates that Christians sent out approximately 400,000 international missionaries in 2010. And nearly half of the world's top missionary-sending countries are now located in the global South.

The CSGC reports that "of the ten countries sending the most missionaries in 2010, three were in the global South: Brazil, South Korea, and India." Other notable missionary senders included South Africa, the Philippines, Mexico, China, Colombia, and Nigeria...

No Squishy Love
In his 1934 book, The Kingdom of God in America, H. Richard Niebuhr depicted the creed of liberal Protestant theology, which was called “modernism” in those days, in these famous words: "A God without wrath brought man without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross." Niebuhr was no fundamentalist, but he knew what he was talking about. So did Dietrich Bonhoeffer when he named the kind of mainline religion he encountered in 1930s America: Protestantismus ohne Reformation, “Protestantism without the Reformation.”

Sin, judgment, cross, even Christ have become problematic terms in much contemporary theological discourse, but nothing so irritates and confounds as the idea of divine wrath. Recently, the wrath of God became a point of controversy in the decision of the Presbyterian Committee on Congregational Song to exclude from its new hymnal the much-loved song "In Christ Alone" by Keith Getty and Stuart Townend. The Committee wanted to include this song because it is being sung in many churches, Presbyterian and otherwise, but they could not abide this line from the third stanza: "Till on that cross as Jesus died/the wrath of God was satisfied." For this they wanted to substitute: "…as Jesus died/the love of God was magnified." The authors of the hymn insisted on the original wording, and the Committee voted nine to six that "In Christ Alone" would not be among the eight hundred or so items in their new hymnal...

North Carolina Governor Signs Pro-Life Bill Stopping Abortions   Late Thursday night, the North Carolina state Senate passed a pro-life omnibus bill that would stop abortions by helping pregnant women and stopping taxpayer financed abortions.

Today, Governor Pat McCrory has signed the bill into law...

...“Thousands of unborn children’s lives will be protected from abortion,” stated Barbara Holt, President of North Carolina Right to Life, “by preventing the expansion of tax payer funded abortion through the federal exchange. By passing this legislation, our state has also demonstrated that it will not tolerate unborn babies being aborted just because they are the wrong sex or doctors being miles away from the patient when they administer drugs that kill the unborn baby and can harm the child’s mother.”...

Chile: Activists Vandalize Church During Mass After Girl Rejects Abortion  Upset that an 11-year-old girl who became pregnant after she was raped decided to reject having an abortion, abortion activists in Chile vandalized a prominent Catholic church in the country — during Mass...

5 Women Missionaries Beaten Publicly in India for Sharing Gospel

Five women have been beaten by a man in the Andhra Pradesh region of India while sharing about the love of Jesus in a public marketplace. Amazingly spared, they retreated to safety, thanking God for the honor of suffering for His sake.

 

The women, all leaders in the Gospel for Asia (GFA)-sponsored Women’s Fellowship ministry, had been sharing with store owners and shoppers when one man demanded to know what they were doing. The assault began with a powerful slap to the face of one woman and continued to the others, one of whom was isolated and surrounded by five men.

 

“Jesus promised persecuting and hardships,” says Daniel Punnose, vice president of GFA (gfa.org). “These young ladies see it worth facing the beatings in order to share the love of Christ.”

Miracle: Woman Talks about Surviving Watery Crash

A Maryland woman is speaking out about her miraculous survival after an 18 wheeler smashed into a her car and plunged it into the Chesapeake Bay.

 

It was a devastating car crash and a terrifying plunge.The oversized truck slammed into the back of Morgan Lake's 2007 Chrysler Sebring and pushed it over the Chesapeake Bridge into the water 40 feet below.

 

Amazingly she's the one telling the story. She said God gave her the strength to stay alive...

In the Beginning Was the Word; Now the Word Is on an App   More than 500 years after Gutenberg, the Bible is having its i-moment.

For millions of readers around the world, a wildly successful free Bible app, YouVersion, is changing how, where and when they read the Bible.
      

Built by LifeChurch.tv, one of the nation’s largest and most technologically advanced evangelical churches, YouVersion is part of what the church calls its “digital missions.” They include a platform for online church services and prepackaged worship videos that the church distributes free. A digital tithing system and an interactive children’s Bible are in the works.

      

It’s all part of the church’s aspiration to be a kind of I.T. department for churches everywhere. YouVersion, with over 600 Bible translations in more than 400 languages, is by far the church’s biggest success. The app is nondenominational, including versions embraced by Catholics, Russian Orthodox and Messianic Jews. This month, the app reached 100 million downloads, placing it in the company of technology start-ups like Instagram and Dropbox...