Random photo: a view of Positano.
Two riddles from my kids this week:
• How do monkeys get the latest news? They hear it on the ape-vine.
• How do you tell which end of a worm is the head? Tickle its middle and see which end giggles.
- John La Grou contemplates The End of the Sunday Sermon
- Atheism and Creative Love Theism …and regarding those warnings about The Golden Compass…
- The Generation M Manifesto (HT: Mr. Bill)
- USA Today on “Accountability Groups” with followup from Ed Stetzer
- The Stories Behind 10 T.V. Theme Songs
- A pie chart of procrastination
- Darryl Dash summarizes John Frame on Intellectual Property; interesting. I tweeted last week that copyright does not protect creativity, it protects a particular business model for profiting from creativity.
- Matt Stone asks another good question
- 10 Things You Might Not Know About Megachurch Pastors: on the whole, sounds like they’re more about leadership than pastoral care, which shouldn’t surprise anyone.
- Scot McKnight poses a good question for thought: how have you been shaped by the “Angry God Narrative” and how has a “Good God Narrative” reshaped you (if applicable)?
- God and the Recession: How will Prosperity Gospel ride out the hard economic times? “the movement owes as much to New Thought metaphysics and Norman Vincent Peale’s ‘positive thinking’ as it does to early proselytizers like Kenneth Hagin. In many ways, it is Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, Christianity’s face-lift, whisking away specters of hellfire and brimstone with a message of self-empowerment.”
It’s been a pretty light reading week again. Summer doldrums, perhaps? What is everyone else reading this summer?
I’ve been reading (are you sitting down) whole books [gasp].
To A God Unknown, by John Steinbeck
World Without End, by Ken Follett
The Outsiders, by S.E. Hinton
thus far. I’m going to continue the trend when I get home and have access to more books than I do here at the cottage.
It took me months to finish — not because it’s a tough book, but just issues of time and energy not coinciding often — but got through *Prejudice in Harry Potter’s World: A Social Critique of the Series, Using Allport’s “The Nature of Prejudice”* by Karen A. Brown. A comprehensive analysis of the socio-economic-cultural hierarchy in HP. VERY intriguing!
Next up:*Projecting Tolkien’s Musical Worlds* by Matthew Young — on the use of musemes (i.e., music memes) to identify specific cultures and amplify emotions in Howard Shore’s score for *The Lord of the Rings.* How cool is that?!
And … *Already Gone: Why your kids will quit church and what you can do to stop it* by Ken Ham & Britt Beemer with Todd Hillard.
interestingly enough i’m reading The Golden Compass
Thanks for the random act of linkage.
I’m currently reading the third book in the Eragon: Inheritance series.
I’m also reading Making Room for Leadership by Mary Kate Morse.