16AR21-47

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AR 21:47 - the Seventh-day Adventist hemorrhage

In this issue:

CULTURE - the danger of "entrusting data preservation and control to private stewardship rather than the library model"

ORIGINS - when storytelling atones for unthinkably proud ambition

SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTISM - self-reporting its "shocking" (and accelerating) 41-percent membership loss rate

Apologia Report 21:47 (1,320)

December 28, 2016

CULTURE

When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future, by Abby Smith Rumsey [1] -- In his review for Library Journal (Mar '16 #1, p119), Chad Comello of Morton Grove Public Library in Illinois writes: "Humanity's choice of knowledge over reverence in the Garden of Eden set in motion a long and imperfect history of preserving memory and organizing big data by whatever means available, which is documented in this short but meaty treatise on cultural preservation in the digital age. The author marshals evidence of memory-keeping from across history [and] advocates for public institutions to act as stewards for valuable digital assets.... By bolstering digital literacy and fostering in ourselves a 'moral imagination' that machines lack, claims Rumsey, we can prevent the cultural amnesia that will otherwise befall our data-saturated world. VERDICT This fascinating multidisciplinary tour is relevant to all readers, especially educators, social scientists, and cultural gatekeepers."

Choice Reviews (Oct '16) begins: "Rumsey brings a historical lens to analyzing what could be lost in the digital age.... She is concerned that digital memories could undermine how people understand themselves and how future generations will understand what they once were. ... However, the book incorrectly claims that digital memories are ipso facto less permanent than memories codified on the walls of caves, on tablets, on scrolls, or in books. The vivid memory management issues people bear with personal devices do not scale to global cloud-based computing infrastructures that comprehensively back everything up. Instead, the questions are who will control this data and how can it ever be deleted? Beyond mere permanence, though, is the more daunting challenge (identified by Rumsey) of interpretation - making sense of the vast amounts of current and future digital data. It would indeed be sad if coming generations suffer the meaning-impoverished overload people now experience."

Kirkus (Dec '16 #2) calls it "An analysis of the significance of cultural memory and a warning about its fragility in the digital era." Rumsey suggests "what could happen amid the rapidity of cyber change that finds new versions overwriting old, even rendering old files unreadable and anachronistic in the span of a few years. We live in an era of data overload under private control.... Rumsey warns that 'it will be hard to avoid collective amnesia in the digital age' if we continue to entrust data preservation and control to private stewardship rather than the library model that is more open and comprehensive. ... Though the author's analysis stops short of cultural apocalypse, it does show how radically things have changed and why this is cause for concern."

Publishers Weekly (Feb 22 '16) summarizes that "historian Rumsey considers the implications of storing our collective memory and personal archives in a frail medium that requires energy to maintain. ... Rumsey also draws on contemporary science in the biology of memory, considering how we might cope with the growing abundance of information, specifically in the acts of forgetting and assigning value, and the influence of collective and personal memory on how we respond to future situations. ... For anyone skeptical about the increasing reliance on digital media, Rumsey eases concern by revisiting information inflations of the past, simultaneously conveying the importance of the issue to a more general readership."

So here's to God giving some of us a 21st-century vision for the development of a secure apologetics resource collective in 2017.

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ORIGINS

A Big Bang in a Little Room: The Quest to Create New Universes, by Zeeya Merali [2] -- the publisher's promo jumps the rails immediately: "What if you could become God, with the ability to build a whole new universe? As startling as it sounds, modern physics suggests that within the next two decades, scientists may be able to perform this seemingly divine feat - to concoct an entirely new baby universe, complete with its own physical laws, star systems, galaxies, and even intelligent life. ... Beyond simply explaining the science, A Big Bang in a Little Room also tells the story of the people who have been laboring for more than thirty years to make this seemingly impossible dream a reality. What has driven them to continue on what would seem, at first glance, to be a quixotic quest?

"This mind-boggling book reveals that we can nurse other worlds in the tiny confines of a lab, raising a daunting prospect: Was our universe, too, brought into existence by a daring creator?"

Kirkus finds that "While at times the book's central conceit seems adjunct to the narrative in each chapter, the author's storytelling makes up for it. Among the most significant scientific advances in the last half-century is the discovery that our universe is inflating exponentially, a theory that led to many more breakthroughs in physics and cosmology. Yet the big question - how did the universe form, triggering inflation to begin with? - remains opaque. Merali, who works at the Foundational Questions Institute <fqxi.org>, which explores the boundaries of physics and cosmology, effortlessly explains the complex theories that form the bedrock of this concept, and she brings to life the investigators who have dedicated much of their careers in pursuit of fundamental truths. She also neatly incorporates discussions of philosophy and religion - after all, nothing less than grand design itself is at stake here - without any heavy-handedness or agenda. Over the course of several years, she traveled the world to interview firsthand the most important figures behind the idea of laboratory universe creation.... A rich and wonderful cosmological history that illuminates the scientific possibility of the nearly unthinkable." We imagine the following dialog:

Reader: "Who do you think you are? God?"

Author: "Heck yeah!"

Reader: "Can you change even one sinner's heart?"

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SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTISM

"Stats & Mission: Former Church Members" -- hemorrhaging with a 40-percent loss rate over the past 50 years. This Adventist Review "2015 General Conference Session Bulletin 4" report (Jul 11, 2015) opens: "Fifty years ago the Seventh-day Adventist Church began for the first time in annual statistical reports to count separately during audits members who had left the church or who could not be found. Previously, only accessions to the church (baptisms and professions of faith) had been separately accounted for.

"We now have 50 years of data on both how many people have joined the Seventh-day Adventist Church and how many church members have left. The former are the figures that we usually emphasize in reports, but the statistics of loss (which do not include deaths) are shocking and demand action.

"During the past 50 years (1965–2014) a grand total of 33,202,016 people have been members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Of these, however, 13,026,925 have left the church (see Figure 1).

"The loss rate per 100 converts is 41 - a constant hemorrhage that negatively affects church growth despite the steady influx of new converts."

Included is a membership retention and loss graph, "Figure 2," spanning from 1965 to 2014 which reveals the rate of loss has actually risen steeply in recent years. <www.goo.gl/HWIcqS>

POSTSCRIPT (Feb 12 '17): Also see "Every Adventist Urged to Help Stem Membership Losses" in Adventist Review, Oct 9 '16 <www.goo.gl/uaHG8N>

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SOURCES: Monographs

1 - When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future, by Abby Smith Rumsey (Bloomsbury, March 2016, hardcover, 240 pages) <www.goo.gl/b62DRA>

2 - A Big Bang in a Little Room: The Quest to Create New Universes, by Zeeya Merali (Basic, February 2017, hardcover, 320 pages) <www.goo.gl/O6BQ5q>

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