Sources: various via Pat Noble, June 2015<\/p>\n
Did you realize that Monday, June 29 was the one-year anniversary<\/a> of the declared \u201ccaliphate\u201d by ISIS? It bought to mind\u00a0 an interview with Philip Jenkins<\/a> by The Gospel Coalition which discussed Jenkins\u2019 latest book, The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade<\/a>. Meanwhile, many evangelicals in the U.S. and elsewhere are despairing about the moral decline of society.<\/p>\n All this causes me to think about social changes, especially those that are ideologically driven. How is the enemy leveraging ideologies? How do we pray, or act? The first thing may be to recognize when what we\u2019re hearing is propaganda and to combat it, if only in our own minds, with hard facts. Since data is inherently boring, I try to find information presented with great graphics, like those from INContext<\/a> and Missiographics<\/a>.<\/p>\n Some creative types use their art to humanize the data. Check out Hard Data<\/a>, a five-minute video and music piece illustrating military data about casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. Jump in and watch from 8:50 to 10:10 to hear the artist describe this work<\/a> (Flowing Data). Another great data visual about war is an interactive 15-minute piece, The Fallen of World War II<\/a> (Neil Haloren). While the civilian and military deaths have gone down, the number of \u201cother casualties\u201d of conflict, refugees and internally displaced people, has risen steadily. See a New York Times visualization of the flight of refugees around the globe<\/a>.<\/p>\n But back to holy wars and the utopian ideals that often drive them. Their appeal may be that they give hope to those who have none. Scripture calls hope, specifically \u201cthe hope set before us\u201d as believers, the anchor of the soul<\/a> (Hebrews 6:18-20). And take a look at the context: this hope is for \u201cwe who have fled for refuge.\u201d We can keep praying for more of those seeking social change or simply seeking refuge to know such a hope!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sources: various via Pat Noble, June 2015 Did you realize that Monday, June 29 was the one-year anniversary of the declared \u201ccaliphate\u201d by ISIS? It bought to mind\u00a0 an interview with Philip Jenkins by The Gospel Coalition which discussed Jenkins\u2019 latest book, The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade. … Continue reading WORLD: Wars and Statistics<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-briefs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5713"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5713\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5715,"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5713\/revisions\/5715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}