Recently in Contests & Tests Category

While the current political cycle has sharpened our focus on the role of religion in the public square, we often fail to reflect on the role of the public square upon religion. Increasingly, when Christians engage others in public forums, we do so using tools that we did not develop. Whether through movies, music, or new media, we tend to start with a pre-existing cultural forms and incorporate the Gospel as best we can.

As communication theorist Marshall McLuhan argued, the tools we use to communicate a message can shape that message in ways we may or may not intend.* If this is true then Christians have a duty to critically evaluate the effect of our media choices on our message. Do our choices of media forms allow the message to remain Christian? Or are the tools with which we communicate at odds with the message of the Gospel?

In order to explore the issue in greater depth, I've decided to make it the topic of the 2008 EO Symposium, sponsored this year by Wheatstone Academy.

Responses to the following question will be accepted until 11:59 p.m. EST on Friday, April 25th:

If the medium affects the message, how will the Christian message be affected by the new media?

The top five posts chosen by our panel of judges (James Kushiner from Touchstone magazine's Mere Comments, Melinda Penner from Stand to Reason, Matt Lewis from Townhall.com, and Matthew Anderson from Mere Orthodoxy) will receive:

(1) A full tuition scholarship for a Christian high school student of the winner's choice to Wheatstone Academy. [A $950 value]

(2) The 'Quintessentials' from Stand to Reason, including the Ambassador Basic Curriculum, Tactics in Defending the Faith DVD, Decision Making and the Will of God CD set, and a signed copy of Greg Koukl's new book Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air. [A $150 value]

(3) A $200 donation made to Compassion International in the name of the winning blogger.

(4) A full-tuition scholarship to the upcoming GodBlogCon (September 2008). [A $150 value]

(5) A two-year subscription to Touchstone Magazine. [A $59.95 value]

(6) A year subscription to Townhall magazine. [A $34.95 value]

The first place winner will have their choice of items with the second place deciding between the remaining four items, etc. The sixth place winner will will automatically receive the unselected item.

Those who choose only to write a brief comment promoting the Symposium are still eligible to receive a prize for participating. Anyone who includes a link to this post and a brief comment will be entered into a separate drawing for one of three copies of The New Media Frontier, forthcoming from Crossway Books.

To include your post in the symposium, send the following information to eosubmissions@gmail.com:

• Name


• Name and URL of blog or website


• Title and URL of post


• Brief summary

Finally, I am grateful to those sponsors who have generously given time and money to make this year's Symposium a reality, especially Wheatstone Academy, a discussion-based summer conference that seeks to instill a love of learning and dialogue in Christian high school students.

During the beginning of the Cold War, the US Air Force began performing experiments with rocket-sleds, a small railroad car with rockets attached, in order to test how humans were able to withstand rapid acceleration. One experiment required mounting a set of 16 accelerometers to different parts of the subject's body in order to measure the acceleration. Each sensor could be glued to its mount in one of two ways. Naturally, the technician mounting the devices installed all 16 the wrong way.

A few days later, a press conference was held and the subject of the experiment, a young Air Force captain and medical doctor named John Paul Stapp, was asked how it was possible that no one had been severely injured during the rocket sled tests. Stapp replied that is was because they took Murphy's Law under consideration, The principle was named after Edward A. Murphy, Jr, a development engineer working on the project, who is claimed to have said, “"If it can happen, it will happen.” Stapp claimed that they were able to prevent accidents by considering all the possibilities before doing a test.

Since that day in 1949, Murphy’s Law has proven itself to be one of the most consistent laws in the universe. Murphy and his team of engineers were used to dealing with design flaws and had training in how to correct them. The common man, however, has been less able to compensate for the effects of ML.

But now, thanks to some panel of experts commissioned by British Gas, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to predict the occurrence of Murphy’s law.*

The panel, which consists of a psychologist, a mathematician, and an economist, has discovered the statistical formula for predicting Murphy’s Law occurrences to be: ((U+C+I) x (10-S))/20 x A x 1/(1-sin(F/10)). [Note: Using the Murphy’s Law calculator makes it easy to calculate the probability.]

The Spirit of America is sponsoring a blogger challenge to raise funds to help the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. The mission of SOA is to extend the goodwill of the American people to assist those advancing freedom and peace abroad.

Donations, which are tax-deductible and directed toward the donors choice of projects, help support such activities as providing sewing machines for women in Ramadi to buying library books for Iraqi schoolchildren.

I’ve joined forces with the Northern Alliance and, so far, we’ve stayed ahead of the other teams. We’re still falling short of the funds raised by Little Green Footballs but with a last minute push (the challenge ends on December 15th at midnight Pacific time) the forces of good will prevail.

Loyalty is one of your strongest traits. Though young and somewhat brash, you also express a deep sense of respect for those around you and try the best you can to please and follow their wishes. Though somewhat shy and introverted, you possess a quiet depth and your goodness radiates.

I've decided to save these stupid Internet test for Saturdays. I figure that anyone who reads blogs on the weekend is either hopelessly addicted to blogging or bored out ot their mind. Either way they're more likely than most people to appreciate this sort of nonsense.

This week's link is brought to us by Ian McLeod:

Which Founding Father Are You?

Augustinian ethics combined with a Jeffersonian attitude? No wonder my wife finds me unbearable…

(Hat tip: Diotima)

BlogMadness 2003, a new contest designed to emulate the March Madness NCAA basketball tournament, begins tonight. The contest consists of rounds of single-elimination, head-to-head contests, where a particular post wins by getting the most votes and moving into the next bracket. I’m entered along as are many of my blog buddies. I’m not saying that you should vote for me or for them -- I’m not trying to game the system -- but I hope you will give them due consideration.

The contest is broken into four regions:

Congratulations to Hugh Hewitt (Best Conservative Blog), Citizen Smash (Playful Primates Category), Xrlq (Large Mammal), Patterico's Pontifications (Marauding Marsupial), and Yale Diva (Adorable Rodent) for winning the 2003 Weblog Awards. They are all deserving bloggers.

Now...can we please lay off the awards and contests for awhile? (Unless, of course, I'm nominated for something...)

Please excuse the outburst. Losing the final round of the King of the Blogs tournament caused me to forget that I'm a Republican.

Bear with me as I pull myself together long enough to give my concession speech:

Thanks to Hugh Hewitt for his support on my quest to win the title of King of the Blogs.

Dear Joe,
My wife and I have been talking about divorce lately. I know you've mentioned that you were divorced (though you never really say what happened) so I figured you would have some advice on how to handle the situation.
R.L.

Dear R.L.,
After five years of marriage my wife came to me and told me that there were some issues that she didn't know if we would be able to resolve. Now I'm not the brightest duck in the pond but I know that there are a few things worse than being married. One of them is being single. I also know that when a women says that she has an "issue" it's women- speak for, "You screwed up again."

I decided the best approach was to take the initiative and fix the problem before it got out of hand. I told my wife that no matter what the problem was I'd change. I'd pick up my dirty clothes. I'd put down the toilet seat. I'd pick up my dirty clothes off the toilet seat. Whatever it took I was willing to change.

Then she told me she was gay.

Gay as in happy about my new toilet seat policy, I asked. Um, no. Gay as in preferring women, she explained.

And then it dawned on me that there was a limit to just how far I was willing to change.

With so many blog contests going on it's hard to keep up with them all. Here are three, though, that you shouldn't miss:

The King of the Blogs The first round of the King of the Blogs contest is over. I was fortunate to join Adrian Warnock and eTalkinghead in advancing to the next round. The competition is fierce. Not only did I get judged on my post but I was graded on site design as well. Since my blog is a cheap knockoff of my blog hero Pejamanesque's site, I'm in trouble.

2003 Weblog Awards Wizbang is taking nominations for the 2003 Weblog Awards. Be sure to go by and nominate your favorites in the new blog, conservative blog, and Ecosystem Marauding Marsupial categories.

New Weblog Showcase Finally, here are my votes for this week's New Weblog Showcase:

Political category: "Politics Trumps Morals" from Joe's Thoughts

Non-political category: "The Fiduciary Duty of Good Faith" by Venturpreneur

Although The King of the Blogs tournament doesn't officially begin for a few more day, this week's entries are already trickling in.

I'm fortunate to be one of the six contestants chosen for this week and entered with How to Handle a Divorce. To win and move on to the next round I'll need a nod from the judges. But you can help me out by getting your "vote" (a link to the post) in early.

Thanks to the judges, the other contestants, and especially Partriot Paradox for putting together this great contest.

Shameless self-promotion gets a bad name. In the blogosphere you'll often get overlooked if you don't tell people about your exceptional posts. So to help those of us who haven't been Instalaunched yet, I've created a new collaborative blog, GuerrillaMonkey.

If you have a post that should have received more attention and you don't want to wait for the next Carnival of the Vanities, send it to jpcarter@evangelicaloutpost.com. The Council of DDAs will take a look and give some link-love if they deem it's worthy.

Also, the Council still needs two conservative and three liberal bloggers to help scour the web looking for exceptional but overlooked posts. If you would like to join the "Linkers of the Revolution" send me an email with your name and blog URL.

The Truth Laid Bear holds a weekly contest for best blog. Here are the ones that get my vote:

#1 -- Totalitarianism

#2 -- Beauty, Pleasure

#3 -- Fareed Zakaria Loses It