ICYMI – May 23, 2012
If you are like me you try to read as many articles, blogs and books as possible but just cannot catch all of them. “In Case You Missed It” is my way of pointing out a few “reads” that I think are too good to miss.
Election 2012 Voting Factors: The Five Most Important Factors Voters Will Consider This November
May 16, 2012 – With Barack Obama’s recent decision to be the first American president to publicly support gay marriage, the lines in the sand are being drawn for the contest between the incumbent and Republican challenger Mitt Romney. A national survey conducted by the Barna Group indicates that despite all the media coverage the president’s new stand on gay marriage received, that issue is not likely to have a major effect on the outcome of the election among most voters. Out of a dozen high profile issues assessed, gay marriage placed tenth in importance and only 31% of voters said this issue would affect their voting “a lot.” In terms of faith segments, while evangelical voters are more concerned about the issue than are most other voters, it is not likely to turn many evangelicals against Mr. Obama since few of them (less than one out of every five) expected to vote for him anyway.
However, a national sample of likely voters interviewed by Barna indicated that of all the different factors they will consider when choosing our next president, each candidate’s positions on important issues will be the single most important component in their candidate choice. More than four out of five likely voters (83%) said that positions on the issues are the most important factor in their decision of which candidate to support on Election Day. The issues that are of greatest significance are health care and tax policy. (For more detail on people’s rankings of campaign issues, see “Election 2012 Priorities” published April 18, 2012 by the Barna Group.)
Rich Karlgaard: The Future Is More Than Facebook
In March 1986, Microsoft ended its first day as a public company with a market capitalization of $780 million. Its value grew more than 700 times that over the next 13 years and made Bill Gates, in 1999, the richest man ever with a net worth of $101 billion. When Facebook goes public this Friday its market cap could easily hit $100 billion, bringing founder Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth to more than $18 billion. That’s about 50 times what Mr. Gates was worth after Microsoft’s IPO.
Facebook’s big payday should be cause for celebration in a liberal democracy. Instead it has provoked two kinds of anxiety. Both imply America’s best days are over.
The first is that America’s innovation engine, Silicon Valley, is again overheating. Evidence: Last month Facebook swapped $1 billion in pre-IPO shares and some cash for Instagram, a two-year-old start-up with 11 employees and no revenue. A week later, another Silicon Valley start-up called Splunk, slyly allied with the decades’s two hottest buzz generators—cloud computing and big data—went public at a $1.5 billion value on just $121 million in sales this year. Yet shareholders swooned for Splunk and bid up its $17 IPO share price to $37 in the first two days of trading.
This has to be a bubble, right?
7 Ways The Church Should Change Its Political Tune -Jonathan Merritt
Getting past left and right.
Aristotle is credited with saying, “Change in all things is sweet.” And perhaps no change of late is as sweet as that among young Christians in the public square. While the last several decades of Christian engagement have often been marked by partisan tactics and a polemical tone, a new generation is changing its political tune. Its individuals aren’t leaving the public square altogether—but they are looking for less divisive and less partisan ways to engage. They want to follow Jesus without fighting the culture wars.
Here are seven reasons why this new political approach is a good thing.
1. Nobody likes a whiner.
Two-thirds of Americans believe we have a major problem with civility. And yet during the past several decades, many non-believing Americans’ only glimpse of Christians has been picketing masses, condemnatory street preachers and shouting pastors on cable news shows. While many Christians believed their participation in the culture wars was important, crucial even, some failed to realize its tragic side effects. As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has pointed out, culture-warring Christians express themselves “almost exclusively in the language of loss, disappointment, anger, antipathy, resentment, and desire for conquest.”
