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Home/Theology/Justice/The Social Principles Word-Cloud

The Social Principles Word-Cloud

A tag cloud with terms related to Web 2.Image via Wikipedia

A mission.hack is defined here. We look at mission statements or at mission initiatives and examine different ways of expressing them. Hacking them…if you will.

Wordle is a fascinating generator that allows you to paste chunks of text, and it will make a word-cloud out of it, giving words that are repeated more often bigger letters (like the tag cloud to the right).  I think it will become a regular part of our repertoire when evaluating mission.hacks, to expose what terms show up the most.  If nothing else, it will be fun to use.

To try it out, I inserted the United Methodist Social Principles (the preamble and main paragraphs [160-166]) into the generator, and clicked random grouping, grabbed a mountain dew, and almost spewed it when I saw what came out!

I hesitate to claim any lesson to be found in random groupings of words.  But I was struck by the way how it randomly placed the two most repeated words (God and persons) together:

While you can read the biblical, theological, and historical basis of the Creed, I think here is the basis of the social principles:

  • We are called to be Godpersons who bring Life to the World.

That’s it.  Pretty simple, eh?

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To find out more about opening Christian systems and other “hacks” visit Hacking Christianity or follow UMJeremy on Twitter

Written by:
Rev. Jeremy Smith
Published on:
July 9, 2008
Thoughts:
4 Comments

Categories: Justice, mission.hack, United Methodist Church

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. pastorbecca

    July 9, 2008 at 9:47 am

    that’s strikingly beautiful. It should be printed on cards. Love it!

    Reply
  2. Anonymous

    July 9, 2008 at 10:16 am

    What’s the significance of the color coding?

    Reply
  3. Rev. Jeremy Smith

    July 9, 2008 at 12:37 pm

    None, random picking. I’ve seen word clouds that do give significance to them, but this doesn’t appear to be one.

    Reply
  4. HP

    July 10, 2008 at 6:15 am

    That is nice! Do make cards out of it!

    And give some to me!!:)

    Reply

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