hattip: Douglas Karr
In Rediscovering Sabbath Rest, Mark Early brings further attention to the “Secular Sabbath” that seems to be gaining steam in the secular world.
As I mentioned in What? Me, Unplug?, I know I should try this myself. I’m always plugged in, even on Sunday.
I remember years ago hearing about how even non-devout Christian families would do all their chores on Saturday, even food preparation, so that Sunday would be wholly devoted to God. I freely acknowledge that I discredited their ideals at the time. I am not so quick to do so now.
A great blog post by brought these three articles to my attention:
- Less Television and Computer Gaming May Keep Children Slimmer. Granted, this is kind of a “duh,” however, the reason may not be what you think.
- An Email Free Day
- I Need a Virtual Break, No, Really.
What I find interesting in the last article is the term “secular sabbath”. Despite being, from my point of view, a contradiction in terms, the concept is valid. In fact, I am pondering avoiding my computer all Sunday. I might even avoid television and gaming (okay, granted I don’t do much gaming).
This somewhat flies in the face of popular “wisdom” that the up-and-coming generation is “wired” for multi-tasking. Just something else to ponder.
hattip to:The Point
In Telephones and What is Good for Us, Randy Cooper writes about the Amish. My big takeaway was this:
It took all summer for them to decide whether they would have phones. They finally decided against it. And they had two reasons. First, they knew that if they began to use telephones, they would carry out conversations less and less in a face to face manner. Second, if they had telephones, they feared that their children would begin talking more and more exclusively to one another. The decision about telephones was made in light of what was good for the community and for the human word.
As much as I love computers, the Internet, and technology as a whole (although, I’m still not all that fond of phones), I strongly empathize with the Amish here. We strive to create social connections on the Internet, because we seem to have forgotten the ones in our immediate vicinity.
Back in August, I wrote about light pollution. I can even still remember the night sky that caused me to write it.
Yesterday, a blog post appeared on the Clampham Institute website discussing the detrimental links between artificial light and cancer (hattip to: The Point). Apparently, in the same article in the New Yorker that generated the Wired.com story (which is what caused me to post in August), David Owens (the author of the New Yorker article) references this potential link between artificial light and cancer.
If artificial light is adding to cancer, what else does it do?
