Jordan Ballor

I am pleased to introduce another new blogger at Mere Comments:
Jordan J. Ballor is a doctoral candidate in Reformation history at the University of Zurich and a Ph.D. student in moral theology at Calvin Theological Seminary. He graduated in 2004 with a Master of Theology (Th.M.) in systematic theology from Calvin, with a thesis entitled, “Barth, Brunner, and Natural Theology in Bonhoeffer's Middle Period (1931-1939).” His previous degrees include a Master of Theological Studies (2004-Calvin Theological Seminary) and a Bachelor of Arts in English (2000-Michigan State University/Honors College). Jordan serves as associate editor of the Journal of Markets & Morality He has authored articles in academic publications such as The Journal of Religion, Scottish Journal of Theology, and Journal of Scholarly Publishing, and has written popular pieces for newspapers including the Detroit News, Orange County Register, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In 2006, Jordan was profiled in the book, The Relevant Nation: 50 Activists, Artists And Innovators Who Are Changing The World Through Faith, which focused heavily on his activities as founding contributor to the Acton Institute PowerBlog. His scholarly interests include Reformation studies, church-state relations, theological anthropology, social ethics, theology and economics, and research methodology. Jordan and his wife Amy have one son, Owen, and are members of Brookside Christian Reformed Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

A few years before Salvo went to print he contributed a web piece, which begins:

It may sound like a creative plot line from an X-Files rerun, but there is strange real-life news coming out of Princeton, New Jersey, the home of the Global Consciousness Project. The project is promoted as “an international effort involving researchers from several institutions and countries, designed to explore whether the construct of interconnected consciousness can be scientifically validated through objective measurement.”

In other words, it is a scientific attempt to find out if human beings across the globe share some greater common “mind.”

The project is based on experiments that began in the 1970s that seemed to show that human thought is able to directly affect the output of a random number generator. These random number generators, or “eggs,” spew forth a constant stream of two numbers, either “ones” or “zeroes.” The Global Consciousness Project (GCP) now includes more than 60 of these networked “eggs” that send the information to be compiled and tabulated at a server in Princeton. The results are then plotted on a continuous graph.

Welcome Jordan!