{"id":530,"date":"2009-06-08T15:11:29","date_gmt":"2009-06-08T15:11:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2009\/06\/imessiah-30-the-third-coming.html"},"modified":"2009-06-08T15:11:29","modified_gmt":"2009-06-08T15:11:29","slug":"imessiah-30-the-third-coming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/06\/imessiah-30-the-third-coming.html","title":{"rendered":"iMessiah 3.0: The Third Coming"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\"Jesus<\/span>Can you take still more sensuality and spirituality from the blog? <\/p>\n

The third generation of the iPhone<\/a> is indeed here. The adepts at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco have seen the revelation: The new iPhone 3GS goes on sale on June 19th at $199 for 16GB and $299 for 32GB–with video, new autofocus camera, faster processor. “Must have!” as Steve Sande of TUAW<\/a> writes. (That’s “The Unofficial Apple Weblog,” for the scognoscenti<\/em>.) <\/p>\n

Yes, the buildup has shades of the Burnt-Over District<\/a> of New York State, circa 1840. But rather than the Millerites<\/a>, the iPhonatics appear to be mollified by the announcement that the latest incarnation of what is often called “the Jesus Phone” will emerge from the heavens in less than two weeks. Promise. <\/p>\n

Is this a classic case of cognitive dissonance<\/a>? My wife dearly hopes not. As luck (providence? intelligent design?) would have it, her iPhone completely crapped out two days ago, and it turns out it was the battery. Just over a year old. You can’t replace the battery, you get a whole new phone, of same vintage, or pay a bit more get a new one. She almost got a “new” one yesterday, but ATT’s online account center was down, so we had to wait. Only after leaving the store in SoHo did we learn a new one was coming out today–not that anyone in the dang store would have clued us in. <\/p>\n

So she is atwitter, you might say. Can she make it until June 19? Yes, we can. <\/p>\n

Question is: Can I? Almost the same time she got her iPhone, I went the smartphone route with a BlackJack, which I like very much. The poor man’s Blackberry. But it always looks so dull next to the iPhone. The screen is going blooey, now, and soon there will be so much more than ever that she can do and I can’t.<\/p>\n

And then–here’s the sexy part–you walk into that Apple store and you are enveloped in a cloud of sensory marketing. It is all so gentle, so sweet, so sleek, so easy to use…How could I not convert, yet again? PCs are Protestant, as I’ve written before<\/strong><\/a>, and Macs are Catholic. Even Pope Benedict XVI–the iPope owns an iPod–knows that. And I was once Protestant…<\/p>\n

How long can I hold out? <\/p>\n

Perhaps I should wait for the next Second Coming: That is, when and if Steve Jobs returns at month’s end from is unexplained medical leave. Religion is mystery. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Can you take still more sensuality and spirituality from the blog? The third generation of the iPhone is indeed here. The adepts at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco have seen the revelation: The new iPhone 3GS goes on sale on June 19th at $199 for 16GB and $299 for 32GB–with video, new autofocus camera, faster processor. “Must…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6,7,4,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-catholic","category-church","category-history","category-pop-culture","category-pope"],"yoast_head":"\niMessiah 3.0: The Third Coming - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/06\/imessiah-30-the-third-coming.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"iMessiah 3.0: The Third Coming - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Can you take still more sensuality and spirituality from the blog? 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=530"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}