Author: Kyle
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Moses says: Learn by (re)living
Proper 17, Year B (Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-9; Psalm 15; James 1:17-27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23) Preached at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in the Bronx on August 30, 2105. Audio | Text: It’s Friday evening at about 6:10 pm. We’ve reached the play’s penultimate scene, which apparently not all of the cast has seen. “Fr. Kyle,…
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How & Why: Big questions in the spiritual life
Proper 15, Year B (Proverbs 9:1-6; Psalm 34:9-14; Ephesians 5:15-20; John 6:51-58) Audio | Text: I’m an engineer by training, which means I’m fascinated by how things work. HOW can be a big question, a noble question. HOW can set us at fascinating tasks, send us on great quests. It can also really mess up…
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Sunday school students should be making things
The pro position of today’s Key Resources Point/Counterpoint gets to the core of my concerns about traditional Sunday school models: My own education prioritized hands-on, project-based, interdisciplinary, student-empowered learning. I wrote jingles and parodies as a participant in Odyssey of the Mind and Destination Imagination, months-long creative problem-solving competitions. I built towers and trebuchets…
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Phineas and Ferb and other fictional creators
I’m still only a few episodes in, but I’m finding Luke Harrington’s observations about Phineas and Ferb to be right on the money. The show really does get at the jubilant and often frenetic spirit of creating things: It’s not uncommon for the end of conflict to spell the end of a show’s appeal. (How…
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Potential for biblical digital humanities with high school, college coders?
When I left a graduate program in applied computation and went away to seminary, I remember having this vision of a custom LaTeX template for sermons. It would format my sermon for pulpit manuscripts, printing, the Web, etc. And it would include a tagging system that would help me better understand my preaching ticks, habits, biases,…
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Churches as maker spaces?
This past weekend was the National Maker Faire in Washington. (Of course it happened one week after I moved to New York.) As many as 20,000 visitors were expected for the two-day event. There were tie-in festivals and announcements throughout the week. One that came across my desk was a blog post from the White House…
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Have a peek at our new apartment
If you follow me online … pretty much anywhere, you might have noticed I’ve had little to say this past week. That’s because immediately after the CMT’s fantastic e-Formation Conference at VTS (a joyful, grueling marathon), Kristin and I moved to New York City. It has been quite a week. Today she begins her new job as associate…
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Let’s get plugged in to connected learning
Writing for the Key Resources blog, I make the case for churches plugging into the connected learning movement: We know lots of churches are already involved in formal and informal learning communities in their neighborhoods. Here are just some of the ways Christians have been involved in the connected learning movement before it was called that: • hosting and providing…
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Tech fluency and Christian formation
Writing for the e-Formation blog, Lisa Brown explains how she and Kyle got inspired by the maker movement at Context 2015 in Pittsburgh: As an incredible example of the intersection of humanities and science, we learned about one of the “Arts & Bots” projects in which students created motorized shoebox dioramas based on poetry. In choosing…
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Loving “on command”
Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year B (Acts 10:44-48; Psalm 98; 1 John 5:1-6; John 15:9-17) Audio (or via Dropbox) | Text: In chapter 14 of John’s gospel, Jesus says these familiar words: “If ye love me, keep my commandments.” That’s a pretty tall order, no? Kind of a lot of pressure? It gets even more incredible when we arrive…