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Two similar pieces are getting a lot of play this week: James Whittaker’s blog post about why he left Google and Greg Smith’s op-ed about why he left Goldman Sachs. Both talk of their high level of company loyalty and enthusiasm in the past. Both bemoan the changes in their respective corporate cultures that led them to leave. Neither seems all that hopeful about his company’s future. What neither of them does, however, is demonstrate that the problem is that Google/Goldman Sachs used to care about more than just making money but doesn’t anymore.

New today from the Century: Interview with Isaac Villegas, Marty on Wood on Chesterton, more.

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you know that we talk a lot about the future of the church--how we need to move into a time of innovation as well as transformation. Dennis Sanders recently reflected on this post, and I asked him if I could put his comments here.

Ralph Wood, who calls himself a Bapto-Catholic, is certainly qualified to write on the militant Catholic Chester­ton, who seldom withheld his fire and fury except when he settled for expressing disdain for Protestantism and other "unorthodox" versions of Christianity.

“Online, I minister to people I may never see. But I am starting a conversation that may lead them to a church.”

There must have been some Lutherans sitting in that conference room when the Revised Common Lectionary was birthed. That is the only explanation that I can come up with for Ephesians 2:1-10 having a role on the Fourth Sunday in Lent, Year B.

New today from the Century: Interview with Vashti Murphy McKenzie, Lutheranism in the lectionary, more.

In a blog post at the Wall Street Journal, Conor Dougherty describes a video game behavior that demonstrates what Century writer Scott Paeth calls "a distaste for playing evil." According to Dougherty, gamers are finding ways to take some of the most violent games and tweak characters or characters' behavior so that they participate in the game with one notable difference--they don't kill.

Video games have the potential to aid in forming us as moral beings, for better and for worse.

Jesus and Nicodemus might as well be speaking different languages. Jesus speaks of birth from above; Nicodemus is befuddled. Jesus speaks of the spirit as wind blowing where it will; Nicodemus wonders how this can be. They are like a creationist and a paleontologist comparing notes on fossils--they simply can't fathom each other. Their organizing assumptions are too different. Here's when we sense that Nicodemus begins to understand what Jesus is saying: when Jesus reinterprets the story of Israel in the wilderness, drawing from the language that has oriented Nicodemus's life and thought. It doesn't seem likely, after all, that the series of puzzling metaphors Jesus begins with would push Nicodemus to understanding. But something clearly does.

New today from the Century: video games and moral formation, internal vs. external church-based advocacy, more.

Do we spend more time in closed rooms--trying to articulate to other church professionals why we are right--than we spend speaking to the media and articulating to the larger world why we believe in the inclusive love of God?