Flying High
Christopher Hitchens on the latest terrorist attempt: “It’s getting to the point where the twin news stories more or less write themselves. No sooner is the fanatical and homicidal Muslim arrested than it turns out that he (it won’t be long until it is also she) has been known to the authorities for a long time. But somehow the watch list, the tipoff, the many worried reports from colleagues and relatives, the placing of the name on a “central repository of information” don’t prevent the suspect from boarding a plane, changing planes, or bringing whatever he cares to bring onto a plane.”
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Voyage
Christine Dente, formerly of Out of the Grey, has just released a new album that is based on The Valley of Vision. Though it looks intriguing, I haven’t been able to find it at iTunes (it is supposed to show up there in January).
The Joy of the Reformed
Anthony Selvaggio: “I did my own assessment of my Reformed experience and, I must admit, I had to agree that ‘joyful’ was not one of the first adjectives that came to my mind to describe it. Then I began to contemplate why the Reformed church seems to be lacking in the joy department.”
How To Destroy the Book
In this article Cory Doctorow writes about new realities confronting readers as books increasingly become digital. I loved this bit of it: “If you’re making a short film, and you want to illustrate a society that’s falling into tyranny, you can just cut away to a scene of a pile of books burning, and everyone will know exactly what you meant. If you want to indicate that a character in a book is very sympathetic, and you mention how much she loves reading and going to the library, then your readers will immediately show sympathy for her. Books have this penumbra of virtues, they ooze virtue, and it’s long beyond anything rational or reasonable, because all of you who are people of the book know that there are many books that are absolutely unworthy of that virtue, and yet–and yet–when I worked in a bookstore and had to strip paperbacks to send them back, it was painful to tear the covers off of books. I can barely bring myself to recycle the phone book every year.”
Virtually Divorced from Reality
From the Courant: “There are plenty of assaults on marriages these days, but the attack from cyberspace is rapidly widening. And as the prevalence of Internet obsession grows, it is turning up more and more as a factor in divorce cases.”
Deal of the Day: Sproul Commentaries
RHB has R.C. Sproul’s two new commentaries (John and Romans) at 50% off. They aren’t likely to last long at that price…