Megachurch Study

Despite their reputation as symbols of baby-boomer America, Protestant megachurches attract a younger crowd and more singles than the average Protestant church, according to large-scale study released Tuesday.

The survey also found distressing news for a movement that took off in the 1980s and remains influential in evangelical Christianity: megachurch-goers volunteer less and give less money than other churchgoers.

Conducted by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research at Hartford Seminary and Leadership Network, the survey of nearly 25,000 people who attend 12 U.S. megachurches was conducted from January through August 2008. It is billed as the largest representative national study of that religious demographic to date.

Full USAToday Article

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Zack Morris Makes an Appearance

I thought this was  pretty clever.  Mark Paul Gosselaar, best known as Zack Morris from his Saved By The Bell days, appears on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon in character as Zack, complete with his old hair and high-tops, and his ability to freeze time.

It was a nice blast from the past.

Posted in Goofy, Pop Culture | 1 Comment

Wordnik

Wordnik wants to be a place for all the words, and everything known about them.

Traditional dictionaries make you wait until they’ve found what they consider to be “enough” information about a word before they will show it to you. Wordnik knows you don’t want to wait—if you’re interested in a word, we’re interested too!

Our goal is to show you as much information as possible, just as fast as we can find it, for every word in English, and to give you a place where you can make your own opinions about words known.

By “information,” we don’t just mean traditional definitions (although we have plenty of those)! This information could be:

  • An example sentence—even if we’ve only found one sentence for a word, we’ll show it to you. (And we’ll show you where the sentence came from, too!
  • Related words: not just synonyms and antonyms, but words that are used in the same contexts. (For instance, cheeseburger, milkshake, and doughnut are not synonyms, but they show up in the same kinds of sentences.)
  • Images tagged by our friends at Flickr: want to know what a “pout” looks like? We’ll show you.
  • Statistics: how rare is “tintinnabulation”? Well, we think you’ll see it only about once a year. “Smile”? You might see that word many times, every day.
  • An audio pronunciation—and you can record your own!
  • Something YOU tell us! Use the “Contribute” links to tell us something—anything—about a word.
Posted in Interesting | 1 Comment