Christian missionaries at work.

According to Wikipedia, there is a new concept out there called "the 10/40 Window". Better let the article speak for itself (though the emphasis is mine).

The 10/40 Window is a term coined by Christian missionary strategist Luis Bush in 1990^{[1] [2]} to refer those regions of the eastern hemisphere located between 10 and 40 degrees north of the equator, a general area that in 1990 was purported to have the highest level of socioeconomic challenges ^{[3] [4]} and least access to the Christian message and Christian resources ^{[5] [6] [7]} on the planet.

This quite explicitly includes Portugal and Greece.

As one of my fellow Mediev-L commentators said, "I hear that the NT hasn't been translated into Greek!" I'm sure they are working on it even as I type.

Well, at least they let Italy off the hook Jack. Spain too, apparently, so Carmen's ancestral home is safe.

X-Files dud: It's about faith?

I never got into the X-Files when it was all the rage. And I have not watched the movie, which apparently bombed at the box-office because no one really understood what it was about. Here is an article about it in The Guardian claiming it is about faith. And the Guardian being the Guardian, they don't much like it.*

Once his TV series and its associated activities had come to an end, Carter [the creator of the series] took five years out. He went surfing, learned to fly and climbed mountains. In addition, he says, he came "closer to faith". He seems to have returned to the X-Files destined to reinvent the franchise for a new age in the light of his own epiphany, consciously or otherwise.

In his film, the message is laid on with what at first seems like excessive and unpersuasive zeal. The wintry Virginia landscape is as unforgivingly frozen as our own faithless world. In enforced retirement, Mulder clings stubbornly to his belief that there are more things in heaven and earth than Horatio dreams of. This leads him to endorse the apparently psychic visions of a paedophile priest, who in turn trusts in God's forgiveness. Scully is the sceptic on all of these counts, but puts her faith in untried medical treatments (she's now a doctor) and the God of the Roman Catholics.

Interesting. If true.

*remember Toynbee's anti-Christian review of "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe"?

"Amazing Grace" - amazing video

Africans, the 'slave scale.' musicology, Christianity. All extracted from five little black notes on the piano.

You should watch all of this (courtesy of Andrew Sullivan). It is probably the youtube video I have learned the most from.

I think I will dedicate this post to Jack and Elliot (the somewhat compulsive blogger)



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