Even though I'm not an Apple kind of guy (sadly, I just never seem to have the $), I have engaged in my share of ipad-envy and similar sins over the years.
And so, it was with sadness that I read about Jobs' [premature] death at age 56. I put "premature" in brackets because it seems self-evident that such a cool and gifted guy really has the right to be around a bit longer.
I mean, hasn't Steve Jobs made all of our lives better (if only by providing Microsoft's Windows and Google's Android a benchmark against which to improve)?
I know. That's rather a utilitarian and shallow perspective, even if I say so myself to myself.
But it's a great reminder of how easily we assign value to someone's life (and death) based on some ultimately meaningless criteria like giftedness or fame or wealth or royalty or relationship to ME. It's a distortion of the Christian Gospel which insists that every life is valuable and every death is a tragedy.
Which is a
http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justintaylor/2011/10/06/the-gospel-according-to-steve-jobs/ which, in turn, takes us to the original article in Christianity Today
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/article_print.html?id=90749
which was originally published in Culture Making, which I'm not going to provide a link to since this sentence is already way too long. Such is the stuff of blogging and borrowing and plagiarizing (hey, I steal, but always give credit; originality is nothing more than a poor memory).
Here's a little teaser--hopefully enough to get you to read it:
But the genius of Steve Jobs has been to persuade us, at least for a little while, that cold comfort is enough. The world—at least the part of the world in our laptop bags and our pockets, the devices that display our unique lives to others and reflect them to ourselves—will get better. This is the sense in which the tired old cliché of “the Apple faithful” and the “cult of the Mac” is true. It is a religion of hope in a hopeless world, hope that your ordinary and mortal life can be elegant and meaningful, even if it will soon be dated, dusty, and discarded like a 2001 iPod.
