Scot McKnight’s The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible will be out soon, and reviews are beginning to appear online. I haven’t seen a copy, but the reviews are all good and it promises to be a good resource. Obviously the way in which one approaches the Bible will colour what we exegete from it, but the exegesis can be effected by how we understand that the Bible views itself.

I was tagged for a meme by Jim Martin where I need to write about “Five Ways Blogging Has Changed My Life.” This particular meme was started by L.L. Barkat, if anyone needs to know who to blame.

Here are the rules :
1. Write about 5 specific ways blogging has affected you, either positively or negatively.
2. link back to the person who tagged you
3. link back to the parent post
4. tag a few friends or five, or none at all
5. post these rules — or just have fun breaking them

Recent testing suggests that the whole left-brain/right-brain dichotomy is not as strong as previously thought. Tests which would be expected to show the brain “firing” one side or the other actually show it “firing” in multiple areas at once, and on both sides of the brain. Still and all, the distinction remains fairly pervasive, and perhaps it’s a useful way of indicating how some of our thought patterns work. There’s no denying that some people are more creative than others, and some people are more logical than others. So the online tests can still be amusing, though one kind of wants to take all of these things with a grain of salt… they’re hardly the paragon of scientific analysis one expects from a controlled environment. A while back, Peggy posted one of these and it looked entertaining. So am I a lefty or a right-y?

Results for the “Which Biblical Villain Are You” Test
You are Caiaphas, the high priest of Israel. You were a member of a strict Jewish sect known as the Pharisees. Aside from praying in the temple, your mission in life was to have Jesus executed. You are a rather ambitious person and you tend to accomplish most of the goals that you set for yourself. This goal was no different. You managed to have Jesus (the Son of God) crucified in approximately the year 28 AD. You had to get rid of Jesus because he was an insult to your pride. Before Jesus showed up, you were the most righteous man in all of Israel. Jesus was not only more righteous than you were, he also pointed out faults in your righteousness. Your pride blinded you to Jesus’ message and drove you to put the man to death. Of course you couldn’t do this right away because many people viewed Jesus as a prophet. This is the point where your deceptive skills came in handy. You welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem as an honored prophet and three days later; you arrested him in the night and hastily set up a trial to execute him.

So Brad vengeance-tagged me with the Ten Movies meme that’s been making the rounds. In the interest of not following the rules precisely, I herein list a number of movies that is not ten, in no particular order, and understood to be a non-exhaustive list. That way I won’t get any grief for forgetting LoTR or Narnia or whatever else I forgot.

For lack of anything better, I’m starting a meme… but hopefully an interesting one that’s not too hard to handle. Rules are simple: name your favorite book of the Bible, and explain why. Link back here and tag 5-ish people. Jump in with a comment below if you don’t have a blog, or to point back to your entries.

Naturally, I’ll dive in first.

Favorite book: John’s Gospel.

Well, after almost 3½ years of blogging here at Subversive Influence and after watching a certain meme go around most of my blogfriends for a week or so, I’ve finally been officially tagged as a “Subversive Blogger.” *sniff!* I’d like to thank the Academy… it just goes to show that if you work hard and blog incessantly, anything is possible. Or something like that.

But just what does it mean? Jake (the meme-starter) Bouma says,

American author Henry Miller (1891-1980) once said, “The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What is dead is sacred; what is new, that is different, is evil, dangerous, or subversive.”

The nearest book to me right now happens to be the second book of a trilogy… page 123, second paragraph, three sentences:

“Concierge’s desk,” said a pleasant voice which did not sound Oriental; it was probably Indian.
“Am I speaking to the concierge?” asked Webb.
“You are, sir.”

Hey, it’s a meme… I’m sure y’all have more profound random sentences than these. Consider yourself tagged — that’s right, I tag the whole Internet, mmmwwaaa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

It’s a meme, some sort of virus I caught from John Smulo. What’re ya gonna do, eh? I figure it was probably started by somebody trying to sort out who the kinderbloggers were and who actually had a “30″ to report upon. Ah, well.

Will Hinton tagged me and a few others with a meme he’s started around the new book, unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity… and Why It Matters by Barna Group president David Kinnaman. The book is getting noticed — a brief article in Time says,

It used to be, says David Kinnaman, that Christianity was both big and beloved in the U.S. — even among its non-adherents. Back in 1996, a poll taken by Kinnaman’s organization, the Barna Group, found that 83% of Americans identified themselves as Christians, and that fewer than 20% of non-Christians held an unfavorable view of Christianity. But, as Kinnaman puts it in his new book (co-authored with Gabe Lyons) UnChristian, “That was then.”