Links to Your World, Tuesday November 25

A lot of couples have written me about Ed Young’s 7-day sex challenge to the married couples of his congregation. I’m wondering if all this interest means they want me to issue the same challenge here—and I’m wondering if my sons would ever show their faces at Hillcrest if their Dad issued said challenge! John Kelso at the Statesman had his own quirky take on the matter.


“Despite undeniable similarities, all monotheisms are not alike. Many Muslims who later become followers of Christ say that they worshiped the true God all along, but only with partial knowledge. Certainly God can reveal himself to Muslims however he chooses, but Islam does not lead lost sinners to God. Only Jesus does” (Stan Guthrie at CT). I know of some organizers at Austin’s annual interfaith Thanksgiving service who should take to heart Guthrie’s words. Guthrie goes on to say, “How can we engage in conversation and still stick to our theological guns? I propose employing the Apostles' Creed—a time-tested and easily digestible template of basic Christianity.” I was glad to see someone else finds apologetic value in the Creed, seeing that my conversation with seekers, The Anchor Course, is built on the articles of the Creed, too.


At CT’s Out of Ur, Sarah Pulliam recapped the ongoing debate among bloggers on the question, “Can Obama Call Himself a Christian?” Among the comments she links to, Tony Jones and Andrew Sullivan certainly don’t speak for me; I think I’m most in tune with Alan Jacobs’ take on the matter:

When people say “I am a Christian” I accept them at their word, just as I hope that they accept me at my word when I make the same claim.  But the conversation doesn't have to end there, does it? It seems to me that, having taken President-elect Obama at his word when he claims the Christian faith, we can then go on to discuss what he thinks Christianity is, who he thinks who Jesus is, what obligations he believes a Christian takes on by virtue of being a Christian, and so on. And as that conversation proceeds we might say to him that we think his understanding of Christianity sadly limited, or the place of Christ in his theology to be insufficient and wrong-headed, or whatever.

Facebook Etiquette: Five Dos and Don'ts


A Random List of 8 Things You Should Know By Now, from how to cook perfect scrambled eggs to how to perform CPR.


Calvin Trillin’s New Yorker piece on Texas Monthly’s passion for Central Texas barbeque made me smile. You may recognize the joints in the article. This year’s Texas Monthly winner: Snow’s in Lexington, open only on Saturdays from 8am until the meat sells out.


The “broken windows theory” of crime is proven true: small neglect of antisocial behavior and physical surroundings contribute to rise in crime.


Back in February I recommended that every guy between 18-35, or anyone who knows someone in that age range, should spend some time reading “Child-Man in the Promised Land” from City Journal. Kay Hymowitz is back with a follow-up: “Love in the Time of Darwinism.” In it, she says that perhaps single white males are the louses she reported on in the Child-Man article because of the disappointments they’ve had with women: “The SYM is putting off traditional markers of adulthood—one wife, two kids, three bathrooms—not because he’s immature but because he’s angry. He’s angry because he thinks that young women are dishonest, self-involved, slutty, manipulative, shallow, controlling, and gold-digging. He’s angry because he thinks that the culture disses all things male. He’s angry because he thinks that marriage these days is a raw deal for men.” Whew! Reading Hymowitz’s two article together makes me (1) prayerful for anyone having to swim in the single adult dating pool these days, especially my sons, (2) thankful I’m not having to swim in it, (3) wondering why anyone would prefer this messed-up world to the Christian worldview with its clear gender roles in courtship and marriage, and (4) wondering how God’s churches can better serve this constituency.


What assessment would your blog get on the Myers-Briggs Inventory ? (HT: Alan Jacobs) According to this website, my blog is INTP, with this explanation:

The logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications. They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

Generally true, but as far as that last sentence goes it’s obvious this sophomoric reviewer can’t grasp the logic of my posts. Oh . . . um . . . never mind.


A website to help you choose your baby’s name.


“I was raised Christian, and I was raised to believe in the idea of the Antichrist. A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we're children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they're scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it's pretty much in the eye of the beholder.” Stephen King, interviewed in Salon on the 30^th anniversary of his horror novel, The Stand. However, Gene Edward Veith of World magazine says: “While King, at least in his novel, recognizes God's existence, His moral order, and the spiritual warfare between good and evil, Christ, while occasionally referred to, is noticeably absent. Bringing Christ into The Stand would mean a figure who took into Himself the disease that plagued the world, who died and rose again, and who redeemed the monsters.” Also, in the interview King considered The Stand to be an American version of The Lord of the Rings. Um, that’s a pretty high aim for a pretty low product. In short, this interview captures all I like and dislike about Stephen King as a writer.


Here’s an elegant visual way to depict the interconnected nature of Scripture. This graph won an honorable mention in the 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge, sponsored by the National Science Foundation and Science journal.


We’ve been looking at ways to freshen up the look of our Hillcrest campus. Any of these 10 unique church buildings strike you as the way we should go?


“When a party suffers the kind of beating the Republicans have taken in the past two elections, the public has not rejected one of its factions. It has rejected the party as a whole. Voters have turned on pro-choice as well as pro-life Republicans, on Senators who favored amnesty [for illegal immigrants] and ones who fought it. Evidently voters did not believe that Republicans of any stripe offered solutions to the challenges America faces now” (Ramesh Ponnuru in Time)


“Postnuptial depression may not be a clinical diagnosis, but it has entered the lexicon of marriage in the past few years, and newly hitched couples will tell you it's real. The blues typically hit early in married life, psychiatrists say, as newlyweds begin recognizing that expectations of how their partner or relationship will change post-wedding are unrealistic. Worse, once the Big Day has come and gone, couples are suddenly forced to step out of their much-cherished, and often long-lived, ‘bride’ or ‘groom’ spotlight and just get on with real life” (story)


Jacqueline Salmon of the Washington Post wrote about the split among prolife groups: some want to find ways of working with the Obama administration, clinging to his claim that, despite his far-left views on abortion rights, he wants to work on provisions that would (presumably) reduce the likelihood that a woman would feel a need to choose abortion. Other prolifers, Salmon writes, feel this is a sellout. In his comments about the story, Terry Mattingly correctly points out the giant gap in the story: Obama’s pledge to sign the so-called “Freedom of Choice Act.” This is the real division between prolifers. “Progressive” prolifers are counting on Obama to ignore his 2007 pledge to Planned Parenthood that “the first thing I’d do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act.” Other prolife leaders are less confident, and bracing for widespread dismantling of provisions that have actually led to a significant reduction in abortions over the years.


“As families face layoffs, shrinking retirement funds, and credit-card debt, economic uncertainties can test marriages and relationships. Some couples are finding renewed strength and closeness. Others will head for divorce court.” (“Marriages follow the ups and downs of the economy,” CS Monitor)