I’m the Video Blogger

At the Campus Ministers’ Conference in Atlanta last weekend, Curt Harlow stuck a video camera in my face and told me to be profound. You can see my best effort in a two-minute video at chialpha.com.

Before you cast any stones–try being profound on the spot. It’s not as easy as you might think. In fact, it’s only due to the editing genius of Curt Harlow that I didn’t come off looking like a raving lunatic.

Anyway, I highly recommend that you poke around the video blog archives. There’s some good stuff there.

If you’re a minister, know that there are several outstanding sermon/sunday school ideas you can *ahem* borrow.

If you want to use one of these video snippets in your meetings (as a call to worship or to illustrate a sermon point) here’s how to integrate it into PowerPoint.

1) Upgrade QuickTime to QuickTime Pro. It’ll cost you thirty bucks and you can do it online in seconds.
2) Open the mov file in QuickTime Pro and click File/Export to export it as an avi file.
3) You can now either insert it into PowerPoint or edit it in Windows Movie Maker (free with Windows XP). Be sure to download the latest version.

If you’re using a Macintosh, you can probably just insert it into PowerPoint without dinking around.

I used the one titled “Gross Stuff phone booth dvdrip ” this week to open the meeting, and it worked really well.

I’m the Video Blogger

Check it out–I’m the guest video blogger on ChiAlpha.com in a clip entitled “I Doubt It”! We filmed this while I was in Atlanta for the campus ministers’ conference this weekend.

Curt (the video blog king) did some major editing to make me sound more intelligent than I was in that section–I was babbling like a fool but through the miracle of iMovie I came out looking not totally stupid.

Also, they have added a video archive so that you can check out all the past video blogs.

Labor Looms Large

Yesterday we went to see the doctor for one of those regularly scheduled pregnancy checkups.

It went really well, but it was kind of funny at the end. The doctor had finished explaining what to watch out for and Paula said, “By the way–what’s this feeling on my belly right now?”

The doctor felt it and said, “That’s a contraction.”

“Oh, I’ve had three of those since we’ve been here.”

And the doctor gave Paula some medicine to slow the process down. Time to pack the bags and get everybody’s number in my cell phone…

Chi Alpha Video Blogs

In case you haven’t been checking it out, the national Chi Alpha website has been rockin’ lately. If you want to get a feeling for what they’re doing, check out their video blogs (the most recent one is a video blog of love, but I think the one on postmodern cookie evangelism is a better intro).

Unfortunately, there’s no index to them all. You can sort of see one at http://chialpha.com/video_blogs, but it’s really just a directory listing. *sigh*

Update: there is an index to the Chi Alpha video blogs!

The Bowling Alley Theologian Strikes Again

Back at SMS I used to head to the campus bowling alley in the student union and help students process questions about God. It was right when the television series Ed (about a bowling alley lawyer) was getting popular, and so I called myself the Bowling Alley Theologian. It was a lot of fun.

I had flashbacks today as I spent 5 hours in a long and rambling conversation with a student. We talked about the existence of God, the nature of truth, epistemology, morality, the nature of Scripture, archaelogy and the Exodus, evolutionary psychology, the mind-body problem, and the relationship between facts, faith, doubt, and skepticism.

It was a lot of fun.