What I REALLY contributed to SAMS
January 21, 2010
If you are 25 and speaking to a bunch of academics, chances are that you won’t contribute much.
If you are 25 and working in a church, chances are you are responsible for the website.
So, if you are 25 and speaking at a theological conference, you might just make a contribution.
Introducing: Amazon Kindle.
Yes, I believe that might have been my largest contribution to the South African Missiological Society.
I was preaching in East-London, in my father-in-law’s congregation a few weeks ago. When I printed out the sermon and liturgy, the ink on the printer was low, and at points the printout was almost unreadable. So I uploaded my sermon to my kindle, and it worked wonderfully. I wouldn’t advice publicly reading a text for the first time in a kindle, since you will have to do a page-flip while reading the last 2 words on one page, and the first two on the next, but for a text that you just somewhat know, it works great.
Plus, it gets you introductions to lots of academics.
Academics love books.
Academics tend to be on the other side of 45 or even 50.
So I delivered my paper, got a few responses, I’m thankful for that.
I delivered my paper from a Kindle, and suddenly the dean of the faculty the conference was held wanted to ask me questions.
I don’t have a large enough portion of my library on my Kindle yet to be able to confirm this, but students and academics might want to check out this post before becoming too excited about the Kindle. I have struggled with the fact that a kind of spatial memory doesn’t work on a Kindle as it would with a paper-book. Hopefully something future e-books might solve.
