Welcome to the online home of Tim Challies, blogger, author, and book reviewer.
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Recent headlines and revelations are causing a lot of us to think deeply about the apps we use, and especially the ones categorized as social media. We are beginning to question whether they are as beneficial and essential to our lives as perhaps we once assumed. As I’ve thought more and more about my apps and my commitment to them, two questions have been both challenging and illuminating. I’ll apply them to Facebook since it is the most prominent and …
By now we have all read lots of articles and opinion pieces on Facebook, or at least seen lots of scary headlines. We are slowly and collectively awakening to the power Facebook has over us, which is to say, the power we have given it. We have given Facebook power one click, one tap, and one like at a time. The situation is not yet dire and we don’t yet have to #deleteFacebook. But it’s definitely time to consider what …
Social media: can’t live with it, can’t live without it. Or that’s how it feels. Facebook, Twitter, blogs–I think most of us have a bit of a love/hate relationship with them. While we enjoy the benefits they bring to us, we also see how they seek to dominate our lives. Many of us now live much of life through the lens of our social media, as if we haven’t actually experienced something until we’ve tweeted it or blogged about it …
Seven hundred billion minutes. That’s how much time Facebook’s 500 million active users spend on the site every month. 700,000,000,000 minutes. Let that one sink in for a moment. Every month we spend the equivalent of 1.3 million years on Facebook; the equivalent of nearly 18,000 lifetimes. More than half of us login every single day; we average 130 friends. And we spend vast amounts of time on there. Facebook now offers 900 million different objects or pages for us …
Sometimes I am tempted to think that I enjoyed blogging more back in the days when nobody read my site. Of course those are mostly moments when I am feeling sorry for myself and the thoughts are not worth entertaining. After all, if no one read this site I wouldn’t get nearly as many opportunities to liveblog some really amazing conferences. And I really enjoy those conferences. Now that I have written a great deal, people tend to assume they …
Every now and again I receive an email, often as part of a group mailing addressed to a wide variety of the most-read bloggers, asking me to use my site as a platform to post or provide comment on a particularly inflammatory issue. I got one of those emails today, this one from Andy Jackson of “SmartChristian” fame. Andy noticed that Ken Silva, one of the writers at the “Slice of Laodicea” blog, quoted Robert Murray M’Cheyne and his suggestion …
A few weeks ago Jason Boyett wrote me to ask if he could send along a copy of his latest book, A Pocket Guide to the Apocalypse. I rarely turn down a book, so told him I would be glad to read and review this one. He encouraged me to review it honestly and to pan it if I felt that was necessary. He must believe in the old adage that “no press is bad press.” The Pocket Guide, which …