Starbucks is now offering music downloads heard in their New York and Seattle stores, directly to your iPhone or laptop. While waiting for your coffee, you can instantly gratify your desire for the song heard overhead. Simplifying your spending, this NYTimes article reveals that pretty soon your phone will function as an electronic wallet.

Admittedly, marketers acknowledge their desire to manipulate consumers:

“The more people think about a purchase decision, the more likely uncertainty creeps in,” he said. “One frame of mind is you’re helping create in consumers’ mind a source of pleasure, and enabling them to fulfill that pleasure,” Mr. Katz said of the mobile impulse temptation. Another is that “they’re preying on our materialistic souls.” (from nyt article)

Concerned or stoked?

In Lectures on Calvinism Kupyer begins by introducing his Calvinistic Weltanschauung (world and life view) and then turns to apply it to several areas of life and thought: Religion, Politics, Science, Art, and the Future. In the seminal chapter on Calvinism, Kuyper briefly discusses various uses of the term from four acute angles: historical, confessional, scientific, and denominational. In short, he describes the comprehensive nature of Calvinism as follows:

“…[Calvinism] was developed first as a peculiar theology, then a special church-order, and then a given form for a political and social life, for the interpretation of the moral world-order, for the relation between nature and grace, between Christianity and the world, between church and state, and finally for art and science; and all these life-utterances it remained always the self-same Calvinism…Calvinism made its appearance, not merely to create a different Church-form, but an entirely different form for human life, to furnish human society with a different method of existence, and to populate the world of the human heart with different ideals and conceptions [italics added].” Read more…