“In the quest for better health, many people turn to doctors, self-help books or herbal supplements. But they overlook a powerful weapon that could help them fight illness and depression, speed recovery, slow aging and prolong life: their friends” (NYT). Build friendships after the Sunday morning sermon at Hillcrest in a Sunday School class or a Common Ground group.
100 Years in the Same Apartment
The NFL likes Big 12 players. Six of the top 20 picks in this weekend’s draft were from our conference. And Baylor offensive tackle Jason Smith was the #2 pick by the St. Louis Rams. (story)
“How exactly does a 40-year-old man explain to his wife that he might have torn his rotator cuff during a midnight game of Wii tennis?” (NYT)
“If you drive substantive Christianity out of the public square, or cheer over its decay into irrelevance, you may rid yourself of the possibility of Pat Robertson, but you also close the door to Martin Luther King” (Rod Dreher; HT: “Death By Deism”).
“Even faster than Google, Amazon and eBay in their days, the three-year-old Twitter has become deeply embedded in the culture. President Barack Obama twittered the words, "We just made history," on the night of his election. It was a twittered image that first captured the forced landing of US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River. Scores of people trapped in the Mumbai terrorist attack twittered desperately for help. And in a much discussed event, a San Francisco technology writer twittered his surprise to discover his home was being broken into.” (WSJ)
“Because they have been largely walled off from the world of hypertext, print books have remained a kind of game preserve for the endangered species of linear, deep-focus reading. Online, you can click happily from blog post to email thread to online New Yorker article -- sampling, commenting and forwarding as you go. But when you sit down with an old-fashioned book in your hand, the medium works naturally against such distractions; it compels you to follow the thread, to stay engaged with a single narrative or argument….There is great promise and opportunity in the digital-books revolution. The question is: Will we recognize the book itself when that revolution has run its course?” (Stephen Johnson writing about digital books in the WSJ)
“If you are walking by Blackwell bookshops, near Charing Cross Road in Central London, chances are that you might want to pop in to buy a book. The book chain has purchased a new device that prints up books at the speed of 105 pages per minute from a catalog of more than 400,000 books with another 600,000 books coming up within the next few months according to the company. The Expresso Book Machine is a boon since it allows out of print books to be printed.” (TFOT)
If you hate rock music, you might be a bug. Maybe that guy in Kafka’s story just didn’t like Led Zeppelin.
‘Lake
Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg.’
Ed Stetzer continues to worry about the declining numbers in SBC life. Giving to international missions is up while baptisms at home are down: I sometimes think strong (rabid) support for international missions in a church can serve as a thin cover for timidity and carelessness about doing what it takes to reach one’s own mission field.
Evidence that the economy really, really is stagnant: Teens and young adults are forgoing the hot labels when shopping at the mall and going for the more economical stores.
In USA Today, Stephen Prothero takes issue with the widely-discussed Newsweek cover story on the decline of Christianity. He says that the data might show a decline in denominational identification but people still say they are “spiritual” in Christian terms: “they identify their faith less and less with ‘organized religion’ and more and more with the personal power of Jesus himself.” He says that pieces like the Newsweek cover story ironically “aligns quite well with the desires of atheists and evangelicals alike. The so-called new atheists want to see Christianity on the retreat because to them, religion is poisonous idiocy. But born-again Christians like the faith-on-the-run story, too, because it makes their centuries-old call to re-Christianize the country only more urgent.” He says that Albert Mohler’s lament on the disappearance of Christian influence (quoted in the Newsweek piece) is more “timeless rhetoric than timely analysis,” to which Mohler replies on his website: “My concern is with the very trends Prothero himself identified. The transformation of American Christianity into just a Christian-branded ‘spirituality’ is part and parcel of my concern.”
Yep, that’s happened to me (metaphorically speaking):
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