Writings
A blog about design, faith, and how they work together. View All Posts
June 14, 2018
activism / books / theology
I recently finished reading Joanna Shenk’s book, The Movement Makes Us Human: An Interview with Dr. Vincent Harding on Mennonites, Vietnam, and MLK, in which she recounts an extensive interview with Harding on those topics.
I’ve known Joanna for several years now; her work with both Jesus Radicals and The Iconocast have been deeply formative for me, and I’ve been deeply fortunate to know her a little, and it’s out of that context that I read this book.
The interview falls into several sections: the Southern Freedom Movement, Mennonites, the black community, nonviolence, whiteness, and building community. It concludes with a couple of articles/presentations Harding wrote as appendixes, which I’d never read before and are themselves brilliant.
May 18, 2018
design
Every once in a while, the user experience design community has a conversation about what to call the people who interact with the things we design. Is it dehumanizing to call them users? Is it bad business? Should we use words like customer, human, person? It tends to go on for a bit, and then be set aside until the next round.
I mostly don’t devote a lot of time to the debate, but in recent years as I’ve been trying to introduce the process of user-centered design to people who are decidedly outside the world of design (ministers, activists, etc) I’ve come to realize that I do have an opinion, and that I think there’s value in referring to people who interact with our stuff as users.
May 16, 2018
politics / theology
I thought it might be helpful, in the context of the last several days, for me to investigate my journey through, and away from, my early fascination with conservative eschatology into something I think is more faithful to the way of Jesus, while recognizing just how complicated and interconnected it was. The framework of conservative eschatology is somewhat complicated because it is so interconected, and it is complicated to move away from it.