February 2010

Wired for Intimacy

  • Tim Challies
  • 02/24/10
  • 4

Wired for IntimacyI read recently of a researcher who wanted to study the effects of pornography on young adult males. He carefully built the structure for the study, determining how he would compare young men who had experienced pornography with a control group comprised of those who had never come into contact it. Tragically this researcher had to cancel his study. He found that he was unable to put together a control group; he could not find young men who had not discovered pornography. The experiment was impossible to conduct.

That is the kind of society we live in today, a society that is absolutely overwhelmed with pornography. The lure of porn is almost irresistible, particularly to young men. If the devil wanted to find a way of destroying young men, of impacting the ability for men to relate properly to women, of disrupting families and hardening hearts, he could hardly do better than this.

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God Watches You Google

  • Tim Challies
  • 02/23/10
  • 18

In 2006, AOL made an epic misjudgment. As part of a research project headed by Dr. Abdur Chowdhury, AOL made available to the public a massive amount of search data, releasing the search history of 650,000 users over a 3-month period. That totaled some twenty one million searches. Before releasing the data they anonymized it, stripping away user names and replacing them with numbers. Yet because of the nature of the data, people very quickly linked real people to abstract numbers—a massive violation of privacy and confidentiality. Within days AOL realized its mistake and withdrew the data. But already it had been copied and posted elsewhere on the internet where today it lives on in infamy.

Some searches were dark and disturbing, others unremarkable in every way, and still others strangely amusing. Often you could reconstruct a person’s life, at least in part, from what they searched for over a period of time. Consider this user:

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A La Carte (2/23)

  • Tim Challies
  • 02/23/10
  • 3
TuneGlue
This is a pretty amazing little utility. It simply shows relationships between musical artists or bands, allowing you to plug in the name of an artist you like at which point it will find some recommendations of others you may enjoy.
R.C. Sproul’s Study
In this ongoing series from T4G, R.C. Sproul takes us on a tour of his study. He gets the award for having the most interesting “stuff” in his study.
No Accident
“Chris and Nancy Hanna tell of God’s sustaining grace through a recent car accident. Chris is the Director of Development at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary. ”

Ashamed of the Gospel

  • Tim Challies
  • 02/22/10
  • 7

Note: This is a sponsored post (click here to learn about sponsored posts)

Ashamed of the GospelA quick note from Tim: Crossway has just released a third edition of John MacArthur’s “Ashamed of the Gospel.” Depending on when you ask me, this book was either the first or second Christian book I read in adulthood. It rocked my world. At the time I was a member of a church that was almost exactly the kind MacArthur warned against in this book. I read this along with James Boice’s book on the five points of Calvinism and I was never the same. All this to say that I’m thrilled with the re-release of the book and the additional chapters that have been added to it.

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Updates of Various Kinds

  • Tim Challies
  • 02/22/10
  • 10

This morning I want to provide a few updates on life, books and web sites.

First off, I owe you an update on The Next Story, the book I’m writing. To this point, progress has been slow—discouragingly slow, really. Yet I’ve got hope that things will pick up soon. I have been focusing on gathering and pondering ideas more than actually putting ideas into words. So while the manuscript still has a word count of approximately 0, I think I’m getting to the point where the ideas are coming together in my mind. That means that I’ll soon be ready to write. In fact, I plan on spending most of today working my way through a couple more books with the hope that tomorrow I’ll have enough firm ideas in place that I can begin to work on some of the chapters. In the future I’ll try to write an article on the actually process I’m going through as I put this book together. For now, though, I covet your prayers and hope to have some good reports soon.

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A La Carte (2/22)

  • Tim Challies
  • 02/22/10
  • 2
Tom Brokaw Explains Canada
This is a great little piece that played as the Olympics got underway.
Tiger’s Buddhist Confession
Dr. Mohler looks at Tiger Woods’ apology and notes “Woods publicly reclaimed his Buddhist identity, having been raised in the philosophy of Thai Buddhism by his mother. The two key sentences are these: ‘Buddhism teaches that a craving for things outside ourselves causes an unhappy and pointless search for security. It teaches me to stop following every impulse and to learn restraint.’” Meanwhile, Mark DeMoss offers the apology that Tiger should have offered.
Uncle Jay Explains
My favorite Monday morning ritual.
A Word from Haiti
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A Debtor, an Enemy, a Criminal

  • Tim Challies
  • 02/21/10
  • 3

Here is one more little nugget I pulled from R.C. Sproul’s The Truth of the Cross as I read through it last week.

Early in the book he spends some time discussing the human condition and as he does so he uses three biblical concepts: debtors, enemies, and criminals. The Bible describes each of us in these terms. What Sproul does here, and this really helped it hit home for me, is show how it is always the Father who has been offended and the Son who intercedes. We have committed crimes against God and are, thus, justly termed criminals. The Father stands as Judge, passing the just sentence of death. But Christ stands between us and the Father, acting as substitute. Our sin puts us in debt to God so that we are debtors to Him. God is the creditor who demands repayment, but Christ stands in as surety. And sin puts us at enmity with God, making us His enemies. He has been violated by our sin, but Christ intercedes as mediator, opening the way between man and God.

Sproul breaks this down into the following simple table:

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An Obscene Mass of Concentrated Sin

  • Tim Challies
  • 02/20/10
  • 9

Earlier this week I read, or re-read, actually, R.C. Sproul’s The Truth of the Cross (an ideal book to read before Easter should you wish to prepare your heart to celebrate). In a chapter looking at the Scriptural motifs of blessing and curse, he looks at the fulfillment of the rite of circumcision.

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The sign of the old covenant was circumcision. The cutting of the foreskin had two significances, one positive and one negative, corresponding to the two sanctions. On the positive side, the cutting of the foreskin symbolized that God was cutting out a group of people from the rest, separating them, setting them apart to be a holy nation. The negative aspect was that the Jew who underwent circumcision was saying, “Oh, God, if I fail to keep every one of the terms of this covenant, may I be cut off from You, cut off from Your presence, cut off from the light of Your countenance, cut off from Your blessedness, just as I have now ritually cut off the foreskin of my flesh.”

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Said Elsewhere

an article I posted at 10MillionWords • 02/20

This Week’s Bestsellers » At last, a reprieve. This week saw the addition of just a single book to the list of bestsellers. James S. Hirsch's biography of Willie Mays (titled, none too imaginatively Willie Mays) hit the list in the #8 spot. It's a long book, though, so it may take much of the week to get through it's 600+ pages. And I'm still only a quarter of the way through Hank Paulson's book On the Brink. And I still haven't read Anticancer. So even with this one-week reprieve I'm not sure that I'll be able to catch up all the way. But I can give it a try.Of note is the fact that Malcolm Gladwell's What the Dog Saw has ended its run in the top fifteen. Also, Mitch Albom's Have a Little Faith and Gladwell's Outliers have both started to falter. Since both have been long-time fixtures on the list, the end of their run may introduce a little bit of instability for a while. All of which is to say that I'd better catch up while I can. Something will have to fill the eventual void when those books drop off the list.

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Said Elsewhere

an article I posted at 10MillionWords • 02/19

Predicting the Bestsellers » The New York Times is understandably secretive about how they put together their list of bestsellers. All we know is that the list is based on weekly sales reports that come from a number of independent and chain bookstores across the US. Though the Times has not said so explicitly, most people assume that the list is based, at least primarily, on retail rather than wholesale figures. Therefore a book that has massive wholesale orders but few actual purchases should not become a bestseller. Fair enough.The list of bestsellers has been changed a few times in the past, often to allow certain genres to stop dominating the list. For example, advice books now appear separate from the rest of the non-fiction bestsellers (for which I'm grateful). The editors also occasionally deliberately exclude "catalog" items that are either perennial bestsellers or that are very old but for one reason or another have made their way back onto the list (and the Bible is always excluded since otherwise it would always be #1). The list is geared toward new titles, not older ones.

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