West Baptist Church

Unplugging is particularly hard if you live by yourself.
Other people are great sources of alternative entertainment – you can play games with them (or play tricks on them, I suppose), have relaxed chats, do some cooking or a jigsaw, eat dinner together with some great music playing, and if you live with other people, you [...]

One of my great hopes for West is that this period of Unplugging from screen-based entertainment will give us space to Plug In to God – maybe Plug back In to God.
So often we say to ourselves and each other that we don’t ‘have time’ for things we say are important to us.  I said [...]

One of the best things about unplugging from screens is that you can enjoy listening to great stuff while doing something else fun or productive.  I am in love with Radio New Zealand, and get heaps of their programmes as podcasts that I can listen to whenever I’m doing dishes or folding clothes or whatever.
Last [...]

Ruby Duncan is a provocative thinker and local hero.  She’s lived in New Zealand, Australia and the slums of Manila, and is now the head of Iosis, the family support service of the Baptist Union in Aotearoa.  
I mention this because she was invited to speak at Parachute this year as part of a [...]

It’s day 4 of our collective fasting from screen-based entertainment.  How’s it going at your place?
So far Matt and I have taught each other our childhood card games (it’s all part of cross-cultural understanding) and gone to the high energy Hospice fundraiser, Grease (more about the unsuitability of this adult musical for children later, perhaps…).
Hester [...]

The average Kiwi watches 168 minutes of television each day.  That’s the average.  So Kiwis spend around 4,000,000,ooo (4 billion) hours a year watching tv.
In this mind-blowing article, Clay Shirky does the maths and works out that the free, online, user-generated encyclopedia, Wikipedia, probably took about 100,000,000 human thought hours to create – and it’s [...]

I’ve gone through a couple of 24 phases in my life, where my heart has raced along with Jack Bauer’s as he strives to save humanity (or at least America) from the latest terrorist threat.
Last time I watched it, something Jack kept saying annoyed me every time.  When faced with a moral dilemma (to torture [...]