This is an article I found in the American magazine The New Republic:

The New Republic | Jason Zengerle | August 17, 2007

When Wilbur Ellsworth ministered at First Baptist, a typical Sunday service–held inside the church's immense but unadorned white-walled, burgundy - carpeted sanctuary – went something like this: Wearing a suit and tie, Ellsworth would stand at a pulpit and preach. Aside from occasionally rising in prayer and joining the church choir and orchestra in some traditional Protestant hymns, the congregants would largely refrain from any activity during the one-hour-and-15-minute service – except for once a month, when they would receive communion.

The service Ellsworth now leads at Holy Transfiguration, by contrast, has an entirely different feel. Wearing his priestly vestments and standing inside the church's small sanctuary – which boasts yellow walls covered with hundreds of tiny iconic pictures of saints and Oriental rugs on the floor – Ellsworth conducts much of the service from behind the iconostasis (or icon wall) where he is out of view of the congregation. The congregants stand for most of the two-hour service, constantly prostrating and crossing themselves, and the only music is rhythmic Byzantine chanting. At the end of the service, they file up to the front of the sanctuary – as they do every Sunday – and take communion. It's easy to see how, for someone reared in an evangelical church, the Orthodox Church might seem like something not just from another culture, but another world.

And yet it is precisely that otherworldliness that is part of what is attracting a growing number of evangelicals to the Orthodox Church. Since the late nineteenth century, when fundamentalism emerged as a response to the increasing cosmopolitanism of mainline Protestant denominations, evangelicalism has been an anti-modern movement. But, at the same time, with its belief in the importance of saving lost souls, evangelicalism hasn't been able to completely divorce itself from modern culture–and, in the latter half of the twentieth century, it began to increasingly try to employ or co-opt aspects of the modern world in its efforts to lure “seekers” and others to the faith. As Ellsworth explains, one of the principal attractions of the Orthodox Church for him is its solidity–and lack of interest in integrating modern life. 'There is, in the Orthodox Church, an enormous conservatism,' he marvels. 'There is not going to be a radical change in the worship life of the church next week.'

Click here for the full article...

Note: When I double checked this link this article had moved into the subscription only section.

It's about the middle of Ghost Month. I used my camera to shoot some footage of goings on around my house. This is just for practice, I hope to shoot more around Taipei City and expand it. It's just 4 min long now. I've uploaded it to Youtube and want to see how that goes, but I'll probably put it on my site when it's finished.

Let me know what you think, like how is the quality, the transition from scene to scene, are the titles up long enough?

Thanks,

Last Tuesday Annie and I went hiking on Bitan Shan, and Wednesday I spent most of the day working on this video. BiTan Shan is a little hill a few minutes from my house. There used to be an amusement park there at one time but it shut down around 20 years ago. There are still some clear paths that wind their way through the hills, others have collapsed or been covered over with mud. It would be a good place for a post-apocalyptic movie. The video stops before I get off the hill because first the LCD screen went all white, maybe the humidity, but the viewfinder kept working. But then the battery seemed to stop giving power which it has done a couple of times. I went back a couple of days later and finished shooting the end.

Annie looks strange in this video because I shaved her at the start of the summer. She has grown her brown, bottom later of fur but only a little of her thick black overcoat has grown back.

This is my first movie shot with my new/second-hand JVC GR-DF450U camera. I tried several freeware video editing programs, but kept having problems. I downloaded a copy of Ulead VideoStudio and that worked the best. I had some problems with all of those programs because of the strange audio system on my computer, and because of the huge size of the video file. After a lot of experimenting I may be able to go back to the free software. On the second video I put more work into editing it down and added some transitions and subtitles.

The first flash video is about 45 MB and is about 14 minutes. The second is 27 MB and is almost 8 min. You may need a high speed connection to watch it strait through. If it keeps stopping, just pause it for 5 minutes and then play it through.