Tim Tebow, the evangelical sports-faith movement, and the tendency to think “Christianly” about success

“Narcissistic, materialistic, self-interested, violent, sensational, coarse, racist, sexist, brazen, raunchy hedonistic, body-destroying, and militaristic.” These are just some of the words that author Shirl James Hoffman uses to describe the culture of sports in his book, entitled: Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports. And, as Hoffman comments, this culture is “light years removed from what Christians for centuries have idealized as the embodiment of the gospel message.” Yet, despite this, the Christian community – and evangelicals, in particular – have fully embraced major American sports within the past century and, consequently, “Christian culture has also invaded sports.”

Why Professional Athletes Love to Gamle

In his piece titled The World’s Game, James McManus outlines how poker has undergone a process of “globalization” that – due to the millions of live and online games being played each day – has transformed poker into “the world’s card game.”

But the aspect of McManus’ analysis that interests me the most is his discussion of elite professional athletes who are able to achieve similar success competing at professional poker – a list that includes Olympic gold-medalist Michael Phelps, Cy Young winner Orel Hershiser, and six-time grand slam tennis champion Boris Becker. Even more astonishing is the fact that T.J. Cloutier, the most successful poker player of all-time in terms of tournaments won, was originally a tight end and linebacker in the Canadian Football League.

If Facebook Home succeeds, it will be because of Facebook’s brand; not the app’s features

In a recent article published by TechCrunch, author Darrell Etherington explains how yesterday’s launch of Facebook Home sparked some backlash from rival Microsoft.

Basically, the story goes like this:

1. Facebook Home is unveiled.
2. Corporate Vice President of Corporate Communications at Microsoft Frank X. Shaw writes a new post on his blog that whines about how Windows Phone (see video above) was “putting people first” well before Facebook decided to give it a shot.
3. We realize that the Windows Phone has been a failure in the smartphone market and begin to question why Facebook even wanted to pursue the whole “people-centric” approach to mobile.

Facebook Home: Taking Over a Smart Phone Near You

Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg unveiled his company’s newest app: Facebook Home, what he described as a “new way to turn your Android phone into a great, living, social phone.”

I, on the other hand, would describe it as Facebook-overload.

Wednesday Rankings: The Top 5 Most Underrated Athlete Twitter Accounts

Within the past decade, Twitter has become synonymous with instant entertainment. And, for many, this entertainment comes in the form of tweets from professional athletes. There is the ever-quotatious Shaquille O’Neal who – although now retired – supplies followers with a seemingly endless stream of “random acts of SHAQNESS.” And then there is the volatile Chad “Ochocino” Johnson, whose tweets range from insightful to insane. But there are also plenty of lesser known pro athletes that have been flying under the gun on Twitter, going largely unnoticed. So here are my top 5 most underrated athletes that you should follow:

3D Guns

“How do governments behave if they must one day operate on the assumption that any and every citizen has near instant access to a firearm through the Internet?” – Defense Distributed

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This past week, Erin Lee Car of Vice published a provocative multi-media piece on Cody R. Wilson and the 3D-Printed Gun Movement. When I stumbled upon the article and corresponding mini-documentary, I was completely shocked by what I saw.

Cody Wilson is a 25-year old graduate student at the University of Texas who specializes in building semiautomatic weapons using 3D printers. He’s in his second year of law school and… wait, what was that? 3D GUNS? Just let that sink in for a few moments. And then consider how Wilson is classified as both a “cyrpto-anarchist” and a “market anarchist” on Wikipedia. I don’t really know what either of those things are, but they sure sound pretty terrifying to me. (My fears were confirmed when I found that Wilson was named one of the 15 most dangerous people in the world by Wired magazine in 2012).

From memes to GIFs to Confessions: The “New Media Revolution” at Tufts University

It is my estimation that a little over a year ago, students at Tufts University fell in love with the one of the the biggest, most popular recent phenomenons in new media: Internet memes.

An Internet meme is some sort of image, action, or cartoon that gains influence through online transmission. The memes that are viewed as the most relatable or humorous are spread rapidly across the various different social media platforms and, consequently, go ‘viral’. Memes, as a whole, are reflective of current social, political, and economic trends and issues in society. They originate out of Presidential debates, movies, NFL playoff games, and other current mainstream events and, then, are transformed into a parodied image. In this way, memes can be considered a piece of culture.