Go Web Young Man

09/04/06 – While I was listening to The Way of the Master podcast yesterday, the host related the idea that the Internet is the new Mars Hill. I’ve also been thinking about this lately, and today I would like to take the time to bring you into the discussion.

“What is Mars Hill?” you may be asking. In Acts 17, Mars Hill is where Paul spent time reasoning with the philosophers of Athens. A parenthetical by the author of Acts reports that “All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there used to spend their time in nothing else than telling or listening to something new.” (NET Trans)

Mars Hill, or the Areopagus as it was known to the Athenians in that day, was known as a place for the open exchange of ideas. It was here that Paul brought the teachings of Christ into the intellectual arena alongside the philosophies of the Epicureans and the Stoics (Acts 17: 18). In other words, Paul presented Christianity as a worthy philosophical opponent to competing worldviews.

Likewise, in the present day, the Internet has very much arrived and continues to grow as our modern day Mars Hill. For example, during The Way of the Master podcast I mentioned at the beginning of this post, the host mentioned that they had posted a part of his debate with an atheist on the online video service called YouTube. In response to this post, another atheist video taped his challenges to their video and posted it on YouTube. Finally, during The Way of the Master podcast, the host gave his responses to the atheist’s challenges. The exchange of ideas taking place was intriguing, and it represented an example of Christianity competing in the marketplace of ideas.

Now, after reading this post, perhaps you are interested in getting involved in this modern day Mars Hill. Maybe you would like to contribute your voice to the discussion or at least listen in? Well as a means of allowing you to listen in, I would like to introduce you to a web application called an RSS Reader. More specifically, I would like to introduce you to my favorite RSS Reader known as the Google Reader:

What is RSS?
First off, RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication. RSS is the means by which blog authors make their blogs available for mass distribution. People like you and me can use an RSS Reader to subscribe to RSS feeds and thereby read their favorite blogs via a common interface at their leisure. For example, in my RSS Reader, I currently subscribe to the following blogs:

• Between Two Worlds - “A Mix of Theology, Philosophy, Politics, and Culture”
• Challies Dot Com - Personal blog of Tim Challies a cool Canadian, web designer, and Christian thinker.
• Fellowship Church Sermons - podcast sermons from my church
• PreachingTheBible.com - John Piper sermons
• Pyromaniacs - “The Pyromaniacs are usually provocative, often annoying, always opinionated, rarely subtle, and sometimes worth listening to. Our doctrinal perspective is essentially in agreement with the London Baptist Confessions of 1644 and 1689.”
• Stand to Reason Blog - A Christian apologetics organization founded by Greg Koukl. I also subscribe to their daily and weekly podcasts.
• The A-Team Blog - “Take a stand for the truth, but do it in LOVE, fool!”
• The Christian Mind - “‘If Christians cannot communicate as thinking beings, they are reduced to encountering one another only at the shallow level of gossip and small talk. Hence the perhaps peculiarly modern problem - the loneliness of the thinking Christian.’ - Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind“
• the evangelical outpost - “Reflections on culture, politics, and religion from an evangelical worldview.“
• Way of the Master Radio - Daily radio show hosted by Todd Friel
• World Magazine Blog - The blog of World Magazine

Forget Bookmarks! You need an RSS Reader:
In the distant past of the Internet (let’s say 2 or 3 years ago), if you wanted to keep up with the latest postings on the aforementioned websites, you might bookmark all of the above links in your web browser and check them periodically. Of course this would take a lot of time and a good amount of clicking. However, on today’s World Wide Web the new way of keeping up with all of your favorite websites is via site RSS feeds displayed in your favorite RSS Reader.

In my case, this is where the Google RSS Reader comes in. The Google RSS Reader features an easy to use interface that allows me to subscribe to the RSS feeds of my favorite blogs. Once I’ve subscribed to a feed, I can browse the titles of new posts via a sortable left hand column. Clicking on a title displays the post in the main content window on the screen. Furthermore, if the post contains audio (this is commonly known as a podcast), the Google Reader displays a simple audio player interface that allows me to play the file.

Get Google Reader:
By this point, if you’re saying, “I would like to try out the Google Reader for myself,” then let me help you get started:

1. Click here to create a Google Reader account.
2. Once you’ve created a Google Reader account and you are logged in, if you would like to get started with some blog subscriptions, you may import my subscriptions if you wish. To do this, follow these instructions:
3. Right click here and choose “Save as…” and save the file subscriptions.xml to your Desktop.
4. In the main menu, click on “Subscriptions >> Edit Subscriptions”:



5. Then, click on “Import/Export”.
6. Click on the “Browse…” button in the “Import your subscriptions” area.
7. Find the file subscriptions.xml on your Desktop, double-click it, and then click Upload.
8. If you followed these instructions correctly, at this point, you should now have my blog subscriptions in your Google Reader. Enjoy!