Skip to content ↓

A La Carte (12/20)

A La Carte Collection cover image

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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCFCeJTEzNU?fs=1&hl=en_US

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

  • A Batch of New Books for Kids

    A Batch of New Books for Kids (and Teens)

    Every month I put together a roundup of new and notable books for grownup readers. But I also receive a lot of books for kids and like to put together the occasional roundup of these books as well. So today I bring you a whole big batch of new books for kids of all ages…

  • A La Carte Thursday 1

    A La Carte (March 28)

    A La Carte: The case against the abortion pill / What I’ve learned about grieving with hope / Heartbreaking deception: teen girls, social media, and body image / Could podcasts save the church from stupidity? / Count it all joy / and more.

  • What God Wants You To Forget

    What God Wants You To Forget

    We are never far from reminding God of our credentials, of providing him with a curriculum vitae that lays out all we are, all we have been through, and all we have accomplished for his sake. We are never far from making the subtle turn from grace to merit, from what is freely given to…

  • A La Carte Collection cover image

    A La Carte (March 27)

    A La Carte: New music / Millennials and GenZ / Scotland’s new hate crime law / Cate Blanchett, Easter is for you / Why the Reformed pray for revival / What truly happened to Jesus on the cross? / and more.

  • New and Notable Books

    New and Notable Christian Books for March 2024

    As you know, I like to do my best to sort through the new Christian books that are released each month to see what stands out as being not only new, but also particularly notable. I received quite a number of new titles in March and narrowed the list down to the ones below. I…

  • A La Carte Collection cover image

    A La Carte (March 26)

    A La Carte: God delivers from the suffering he ordains / The beautiful partnership of family and church / The end of religious liberty / On whales, menopause, and thanks to God / Ordinary women, extravagant gifts / and more.