GlobalColonnade

What a conference! Global Leadership Forum 2007

Well it's over and we're still reeling from the incredible conversations we had at Global Leadership Forum 2007 at Fairfax Community Church. For those who missed it, be sure to check out the video on GlobalChristian.org in a few weeks. For those who caught it, let us know what you thought - so far our evaluations have all averaged well over four out of five. Your top three favorite speakers were Hadia Mubarak, Ahmed Younis and Madeleine Albright. Check out this survey to give some feedback or comment on this blog. http://survey.constantcontact.com/survey/a07e2634svbf6uz0xhz/start

What did you think of the spontaneous hug that one of our Muslim panelists gave to a Christian question fromm the audience?

Dallas Morning News on Northwood Church

Our favorite Texas pastor, Bob Roberts, is defying stereotypes again, this time by this time by inviting a delegation of Vietnamese government officials to spend three days in Texas hosted by NorthWood Church. Bob and his staff arranged for meetings with businesses, ministries, and NGOs to discuss how they could help Vietnam reach its economic development goals. IGE's Hien Vu participated in the meetings, and reported that the Vietnamese officials expressed their gratitude for NorthWood's love for the poor. It was so extraordinary that it was covered by the Dallas Morning News. The different work of NorthWood and IGE respectively was also covered by Christianity Today in May in a variety of ways. IGE's Jared Daugherty also wrote an article advocating a constructive approach to religious freedom in Vietnam.

Best PowerPoint You've Ever Seen...and it's on Global Poverty Statistics

Technology, Entertainment and Design (T.E.D.) is an annual gathering in California of the so-called "brightest and best" and they recently started to post video of past presentations. I stumbled across this presentation by Hans Rosling on global poverty statistics in 2006. (He did a follow-up at TED in 1997.) I've seen a lot of presentations on global poverty statistics and read the UNDP Human Development Report over the years, but Rosling blew my preconceptions out of the water. He had people applauding in the middle of his talk! Smart, funny and gives the best darned PowerPoint presentation I have ever seen. To top that off, the tools he used for his presentation are available free at Gapminder, the non-profit organization Rosling founded to combine information technology and statistics to better understand poverty and development.