Tim, In your post entitled “The Phone Call Is Dead”, you write: “One trend we are seeing in communication today is a move from more-mediated to less-mediated forms.” Don’t you mean the opposite?John

I don’t know what rock I’ve been living under, but I was not aware of the free Piper books. THANK YOU for letting us know about them!

My twenty-something nieces and nephews are huge Beatles fans. But I do think that Beatlemania largely skipped those of us born in the 70s.

My husband is always forgetting what grade our kids are in. People that don’t know we homeschool are horrified when they ask what grade our kids are in and he can’t remember. The kids have learned to quickly supply the answer for him if they’re there.

Tim,

I surprised you missed today as the birthday of one of Canada’s greatest songwriter/musicians…Gordon Lightfoot.

I’m listening to my GL collection right now!

Thanks for the link to the free Piper books. I will be loading them on my Kindle.

Also, the beautiful thing about homeschooling is that we can move children as they have the ability in each subject. Therefore, they may be way ahead in one area and slowly trudging along in another. I like that.

A heads up to your readers about the Botkins and the Navigating History project—these are not your garden variety Reformed Christians. The patriarch of the Botkin clan, Geoffrey Botkin, seems to have come up with yet another marketing scheme to convince families eager to learn “visionary” secrets of “multi-generational faithfulness”, “taking dominion” and raising “Biblical families” to part with their hard-earned money in order to support the Botkins. When the economy and dwindling interest failed to bring in the crowds for the Botkins’ speaking engagements (at up to $1500 for the top-secret conference in Atlanta in 2009, helping families “preserve wealth” and be “secure” in “dangerous times”), the Botkins came up with the clever idea of selling their superior knowledge via podcasts, DVDs and webcasts such as the Navigating History project ($49.95).

Of course, they are perfectly free to market themselves to willing consumers, but they present themselves as Reformed, only a partial truth. The Botkins, along with Doug Phillips of Vision Forum, Scott Brown of the National Center for Family-Integrated Churches, and others associated with them, teach that daughters (of any age) belong to their fathers until transferred to their husbands’ authority, secular education is to be avoided at all costs, formal education is for sons only, as daughters are to serve their fathers at home and “advance his vision” through pursuit of advanced homemaking skills and occasionally correspondence classes. Geoffrey Botkin has developed a 200 year plan for his family which involves one of his sons becoming prime minister of New Zealand in his 50’s; they were and may still be recruiting anxious families to make an exodus to NZ, as it is more suited for cultural dominion.

If you happen to be “likeminded” with the Botkins and Phillips crowd, no doubt you will be glad to support them and fund their desire to travel by subscribing to this latest project. If, however, you do not believe (among other things) that family-integrated churches are the only Biblical way to worship, that fathers—not Jesus Christ—are the prophets, priests and kings of their families, that grown children—sons and daughters—subvert their own “vision” to that of their fathers’, and that women are not to speak in church for any reason, including sharing prayer requests, then they will probably still gladly take your money while referring to you as “professing Christians” and “Jezebels” who are not faithfully following true Biblical paths.

A careful examination of the teachings of the Botkin family and Vision Forum reveals little exaltation of the redeeming and atoning, gracious work of Jesus Christ; they appear to focus on extrabiblical moralistic rules for living, while giving Him token mention. This alarming branch of Christian homeschooling (patriarchy or “patriocentricity”) has brought pain and division to many churches and families. Unfortunately, I have witnessed it all too closely, and I pray that others do not fall under their spell in their earnest desire to please God and raise godly families.

Tim, many people trust your discerning recommendations. I hope you will not provide publicity to the Botkin family, Vision Forum, etc., without giving a caveat and providing links to those who are attempting to expose their dangerous teachings. These include Karen Campbell http://www.thatmom.com/ , Don Veinot, http://midwestoutreach.org/blogs/category/vision-forumpatriarchy, and Cyndi Kunsman http://undermuchgrace.blogspot.com/2008/12/who-is-geoffrey-botkin-vision… (Note: I am a happily married, Reformed, conservative member of a sound Bible-teaching church, and don’t think of myself as a feminist, although I’m sure the Botkins would call me a Jezebel.)

Dear Tim,

Thank you for pointing to those free books by Pastor John Piper. I am thankful to read from his wisdom in teaching the word of God. He is generous!

Sonia Rose

The Beatles on iTunes comes a year too late for me - I ponied up for their box sets last year, and have imported them already. Besides, with iTunes purchases you don’t own the recording - you only own the right to use it as long as Apple stays in the business (or until your computer crashes and your backups fail or wind up being in an obsolete format). And you can’t lend someone the album to listen to.

For some of us (Phil “TeamPyro” Johnson and me at least), the iPod’s “functionally infinite storage capacity” doesn’t apply. I’ve been waiting 3 years now for that 240 or 320 gig iPod, in order to get the rest of my music (all legal) onto it.