A La Carte (12/20)

  • Tim Challies
  • 12/20/10
  • 2

Yesterday evening our church was able to enjoy a baptism service and see 3 people make that public profession of faith. What an awesome thing God has done in giving us baptism, a visible rite that speaks so clearly about the inner change he has wrought.

The Half-Life of Celebrity - “Is it possible to study something as ill-defined as culture in a quantitative manner? Researchers from Harvard have collaborated with Google and some traditional publishers to answer that question with a qualified ‘yes.’ By leveraging a portion of Google’s massive library of digitized books, the team has created what they call a ‘culturome,’ with which they can track the use of language and terms across hundreds of years.”

I Looked For Love in Your Eyes - In case you missed it on Saturday, you should check out this poem a reader of the site shared with me. Almost 20,000 people read it this weekend.

TV and Teen Girls - This is pretty obvious but still worth thinking about that next time you sit down to watch some television. “According to a new study conducted by the Parents Television Council (PTC), Hollywood is shockingly obsessed with sexualizing teen girls, to the point where underage female characters are shown participating in an even higher percentage of sexual situations than their adult counterparts: 47 percent to 29 percent respectively.”

Sistine Chapel - An amazing virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel.

The Woman Without Fear - I found this a rather interesting article. “SM is a woman without fear. She doesn't feel it. She has been held at knifepoint without a tinge of panic. She'll happily handle live snakes and spiders, even though she claims not to like them. She can sit through reels of upsetting footage without a single start. And all because a pair of almond-shaped structures in her brain - amygdalae - have been destroyed.”

3 Lessons in Parenting Teens - David Murray offers up some sound wisdom (and searching questions) related to parenting teenagers.

Rudolph - A Christmasy laugh:

Rudolph

Silent Monks - This is pretty clever:

There are no deadlines against which God must work. Only to know this is to quiet our spirits and relax our nerves. —A.W. Tozer

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Comments (2)

1
Anonymous's picture
a comment from DR • 12/20 @ 2:55pm

I’m failing to see the usefulness of posting a poem like that. Perhaps this is the result of a very limited context, as nothing of the back story is known here. Maybe the graphic nature of this poem seems like a direct transgression of Paul’s useful advice in Ephesians 5:12. Or perhaps it’s just totally inappropriate for a woman to write a poem (even if anonymously) sharing her complete and total frustration against her federal head’s sin for the whole world to see. I’m not condoning the husband’s sin. Quite the contrary I find this is the sort of thing that ought to be dealt with by her ecclesiastical authorities. Discipline is a true mark of the church and a means of grace, blogging your frustration isn’t.

I agree pornography is a horrible sin, and one which destroys families (so does pride, so does worldliness, so does vanity, so does idle chatter, so does Sabbath-breaking, so does disrespect, etc). But maybe many Christian couples need a wake up call. You married a sinner! There is not a single sin or unlawful principle in Satan which does not, to some extent, still reside within the breast of all believers. Do we just pay lip service to the “T” of TULIP?

2
Anonymous's picture
a comment from Anonymous • 12/20 @ 6:30pm

DR

You’re entitled to your view of the poem and the publication thereof, but I think you are wrong and bring no biblical reason why this should not be discussed maturely in a blogg context.

I can tell you that as a man who has been entrapped by a deceitful heart wrt this particular sin, this poem was written and published just at the right time for me (and by the look of the responses, by many others as well). The effects of sin are not contained within the dark room with just the man (or woman) but have ramifications which run deeply. I am grateful for the woman’s poem and the heart felt expression of the effect of one particular sin had on her personal relationship with her husband. I, as a man needed to hear this. To me the poem has been a means of grace (as you say in reformed circles) and the Holy Spirit has convicted me and caused for me to repent and have done with sin.

DR, you sound like an elder to me - I really hope you deal with ‘ecclesiastical authority’ with grace, those to whom God has put under your charge.