Timmy Brister, he of Provocations and Pantings fame, has been hard at work putting together a time of fellowship for bloggers who will be attending the upcoming Together For The Gospel Conference. The fellowship will take place immediately before the conference begins–on Wednesday, April 26 at 3:00 p.m. in the Heritage Hall of The Southern…
Thursday April 13, 2006 Web: William Dicks points out that Google is hosting a blog that promotes ‘boy love’–sexual relationships between men and adolescents. He recommends urging Google to drop the site. Music: The Thirsty Theologian has written a song. A really bad song. But he points to a post by Libbie that contains a…
Why is it that when a person is looking for a house, driving slowly down a darkened street straining to see the numbers on the fronts of the homes or on the mailboxes at the end of the driveways, he automatically turns down the car radio? He does so because he instinctively knows that music…
Wednesday April 12, 2006 Music: Here is a song that, if you listen to it, will be playing in your head all day (whether you want it to or not…and you probably don’t). Family: Dr. Mohler discusses a rather shocking new book. “When that discernment evaporates, desire is all that remains. When such a desire…
Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading is the second of a five-part series of books being written by Eugene Peterson who is best known as the translator of The Message. This series of books comes in the twilight years of Peterson’s career as author, pastor and translator, and it allows…
Tuesday April 10, 2006 Just for kicks I thought we would do an all-Emergent A La Carte for today. Emergent: Yesterday I attended a meeting in which my friend Paul presented a paper on the Emerging church. I thought he did a very good job of representing and critiquing this movement. He will be incrementally…
Yesterday morning in church we sang a song I knew from the album “Songs For The Cross Centered Life” but had never had the privilege of singing during a worship service. The song was “I Come By The Blood” by Steve and Vikki Cook. It is quite a recent song, but one whose expression of…
Monday April 9, 2006 Film: Justin Taylor passes along an email telling Christians how to respond to the Da Vinci Code movie. Theology: John Hendryx of Monergism fame writes about “The Historicity of the Resurrection.” Humor: “Bin Can Can” is a short film showing what happens to our trash cans when there is no one…
When it comes to evangelism, it seems that Calvinists have quite a poor reputation in the church today. Most of the largest and seemingly most successful mission organizations were founded by Arminians and continue to be based around Arminian theology. Arminian churches seem to grow much faster than churches based on Calvinist principles. It seems…
It seems unusual, does it not, that at a time when the church is in such dire need of discernment, there are few books to be found that address this critical issue. Or perhaps it is this dearth of books dealing with discernment that have contributed to the problem. Regardless, at a time when the…
Thursday April 6, 2006 Education: Justin Taylor quotes Mortimer Adler on “The Pain of Learning.” “One of the reasons why the education given by our schools is so frothy and vapid is that the American people generally–the parent even more than the teacher–wish childhood to be unspoiled by pain.” Creation: National Geographic has an interesting…
Until yesterday it had been quite a while since I had written about worship. I had forgotten what a difficult and even contentious issue it is within the church. I guess, at least to some extent, it has always been this way. The issue of music brings out both the best and the worst in…
Friday April 7, 2006 Help: If there is a PHP braniac out there who could spare the time to answer a couple of my questions, I should would appreciate a little bit of help with a project I’m working on. Contact me if you are willing and able to help! Culture: Joe over at Evangelical…
The most recent issue of Christianity Today features a short article by Chuck Colson entitled “Soothing Ourselves to Death” which, if you are so inclined, you could read by clicking here. Colson contends that “much of the music being written for the church today reflects an unfortunate trend–slipping across the line from worship to entertainment.…
King for a Week is an honor I bestow on blogs that I feel are making a valuable contribution to my faith and the faith of other believers. Every week (or so) I select a blog, link to it from my site, and add that site’s most recent headlines to my left sidebar. While this…
Ah, the joys of blogging. I was far from thrilled to find an email in my inbox shortly after nine o’clock this morning telling me that my site was enduring a massive spam attack. My site faces vast quantities of spam, often even hundreds of them an hour, thousands of them a day. The more…
Wednesday April 5, 2006 Da Vinci: Alistair Begg agrees that Christians should be prepared to defend against Da Vinci. “Please do not misunderstand me when I tell you how disappointed I am with our featured book this month, The Da Vinci Deception. My problem is not with the book (it’s helpful), nor with the author…
Classical music was once almost exclusively the preserve of white men. It was believed that women could simply not play as well as men, for they did not have the strength, attitude or resilience for many pieces of music. Over the past few decades, though, classical music has undergone a transformation. Musicians, rather than facing…
I mentioned to a friend that I was reading Mark Buchanan’s book Your God Is Too Safe and that I had recently finished The Rest of God. “What’s Buchanan like?” he wanted to know. The best I could do was to suggest that the style and theme of his writing is quite a lot like…
Tuesday April 4, 2006 Pornography: Slice of Laodicea reports on Christian Pornography. “A publisher is soliciting descriptions of ‘godly’ passion in the married bed with a special appeal to pastors wives to share their ‘stories’.” Humor: WestJet, Canada’s favorite (and only profitable) airline, has asked customers to contribute to realizing gains in fuel efficiency. “Beginning…