in the open space: God & culture

Lynch/Frost Productions In May, Showtime released a limited series revival of Twin Peaks , a 1990 quirky two-season television crime drama set in a small town in Washington and centered on FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper’s investigation of the murder of a teenager named Laura Palmer.  I hadn’t watched the original series, so when I ran across it on Netflix, I thought I’d try to give it a go before Showtime’s series aired. From the opening scene, however, I was utterly confused. The characters made references to other characters as if I  should already know who they are, and I couldn’t really grasp what was going on from scene to scene. At first, I chalked it up to creator David Lynch’s surreal style, but half-an-hour in I discovered why I was so confused: I was watching the first episode of the second season instead of the first season. The memory still makes me laugh, but it also reminds me of the way many of us approach Scripture. We often start in the middl...

Last summer, my family acquired one of the latest revolutions in virtual reality — a headset that uses a smartphone as a display. It looks like a giant visor, and once you hold it up to your eyes and strap it on, you are immersed in a wide variety of 360 environments — from standing in a dense forest with a very real-looking computer-generated dinosaur to balancing on a surfboard gliding under giant curved walls of moving water. Some of the environments almost feel like the real thing — and many people are drawn to it. “This technological paradigm shift brings a level of immersion unlike any that has come before it,” says Monica Kim in “ The Good and the Bad of Escaping to Virtual Reality .”                                                ...

photo by Carmen Andres Recently, friends of mine who are software developers told me about Netflix’s data collection, which not only tracks everything we watch but also every time we fast-forward, rewind, pause or abandon a movie or show altogether. Netflix uses this information to personalize recommendations as well as make decisions about what programming to feature or create. In “How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood,” Alexis Madrigal explores how Netflix also “microtags” every movie and show (from the plot, director and actors to the main characters’ jobs), incorporating that data into a system she compares to Facebook’s Newsfeed—“but instead of serving you up pieces of web content that the algorithm thinks you’ll like, Netflix is serving you up filmed entertainment.” I find all that pretty impressive (and handy)—but others are a bit more wary. In “How Netflix is Using Big Data,” Ritika Tiwari notes that some critics are concerned that Netflix is abusing the...

via Wikipedia Kyle Hinckley made a stir in the video-game world by successfully completing the hardest mode of  Fallout 4  with zero kills.

IT’S JANUARY IN BEIRUT, LEBANON. The air is cold in the shade of the old apartment building I walk into with Hoda Melki and two other women from Heart for Lebanon , a Lebanese faith-based relief and development organization working with Iraqi and Syrian refuges. Over 1.8 million Syrian and Iraqirefugees have fled to Lebanon due to the Syrian civil war and the unrest in Iraq. H4L, which Hoda and her husband Camille founded in 2006, provides food and hygiene distributions to over 800 Iraqi families in Beirut. Hoda is taking me to meet one of the families. Inside the building’s concrete foyer, a door opens to a tiny elevator, its floor hovering a few inches above the foyer. It isn’t big enough for all of us, so I follow Hoda up four flights of stairs to a small landing with only two doors. One of the doors opens and we step into a long corridor. Inside, a kind faced Iraqi man in his 30s meets us. The women talk with him in Arabic and introduce me. His name is Adeeb. His...

Syrian child in a tent settlement in the Bekka Valley, Lebanon © Carmen Andres In January of this year, I traveled to Lebanon with a small team from my church to gather stories from Syrian and Iraqi refugees displaced by the civil war in Syria and the conflict in Iraq. The unrest in the Middle East has unleashed  an historical humanitarian crisis . More than two million have fled Iraq. In an attempt to escape the Syrian civil war, over three million Syrians have fled to Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon (which alone has almost 1.8 million refugees within its borders). Millions more are displaced within the borders of Syria. To record  my journey  and  the stories   I gathered there , I created a space called  For Such a Time is Now . Every so often, I will be cross posting stories here on In the Open Space because this issue is something I care deeply about--and frankly, these stories need to be brought into as many open spaces as possible. Many of...

If you have Facebook, you’ve probably seen a lot of “Year in Review” posts, in which Facebook gathers a selection of photos from the past year and puts them together in a kind of mini scrapbook. Chances are you’ve done it yourself. I did. And if you have Facebook, you also might have seen the story going around about one father’s reaction to the meme . For web design consultant and writer Eric Meyer, it wasn’t such a great year . His six year old daughter died of brain cancer. For him, the “Year in Review” was painful.  “To show me Rebecca's face and say 'Here's what your year looked like!' is jarring," Meyer wrote in a blog post, using his experience to illustrate the point that more thought needs to be put into designing code like the one Facebook used for its meme. "It feels wrong, and coming from an actual person, it would be wrong. Coming from code, it's just unfortunate." Meyer’s post went viral—a surprise to him, as he didn’t ...

©  Duard Van Der Westhuizen  |  Dreamstime Stock Photos When I work, I often play music in the background. Recently I noticed that I was gravitating toward playlists I’d made from film soundtracks. I enjoyed the music itself, but I was also experiencing something else: comfort. It had been a challenging few weeks, and the music was helping me feel more grounded and peaceful. When I thought about it, that made sense. The music is associated with some of my favorite films that, in the midst of their sometimes dark worlds, are life-affirming and woven through with redemption, hope and love. In some way, the music was weaving the truths of those stories back into my soul. And that intrigued me. I’ve long known that we human beings are wired to respond to stories, but I was struck by how subtly and deeply they were influencing me and my outlook on life. In “ Why Fiction Is Good for You ,” Jonathan Gottschall notes that research indicates fiction profoundly shapes ou...

Hadija is 10 years old. She wakes up at 6:00am, climbs in the back of a truck full of children, and drives to a potato field in the Bekaa Valley where she will work for at least seven hours.   Rami is 12 years old. Two years ago, he was in school in Syria, where his mom was a teacher. Today, he is in Lebanon, where he spends his day working behind a desk in a garage fixing tires.   Abdel is seven. He sleeps on a cement floor in a tent with a plastic chair, a bucket and a few blankets. His last meal was the day before. Some rice.   Dania is also seven. Under her Hello Kitty shirt is a jagged, stitched-up wound reaching from her belly button to her rib cage. Her legs are covered with scars from shrapnel.   Raeda is 15. She lost sight in her right eye after being hit by shrapnel. There are over three million other stories just like these. Three million . That’s the population of Phoenix and Philadelphia combined. That’s more people than live in ...