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A La Carte (October 26)

friday

The streak of Kindle deals ran out today. We’ll hope for better things over the weekend and into next week.

(Yesterday on the blog: EPIC Ecuador: Not Just Any Dam)

Reagan’s Challenge to His Dying Atheist Father-In-Law

Isn’t this an interesting little bit of history… “From the letter it’s clear that Reagan has been doing some reading about God, sharing with his father-in-law arguments that probably came from C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity and Josh McDowell’s Evidence That Demands a Verdict.”

Your Church is Not a Restaurant

Trevin Wax: “In a consumer-oriented society, the default orientation for church attenders is to see their local congregation as a dispenser of religious goods and services. I say ‘default’ not because it’s inevitable that everyone who goes to church perceives their congregation this way, but because without serious and sustained effort to have a more biblical approach people will naturally gravitate toward a view of the church that is influenced by a consumerist imagination.”

How Christians Pursue Unity on Social Media

This is an important one for today. “It seems to me that the rise of social media has pushed people from a place of freedom of speech to duty of opinion. In other words, we’ve moved from the privilege of enjoying freedom of speech to being compelled to give our opinion on every matter, sometimes several times a day. The sheer volume of opinions and re-sharing of opinions has led to pain and divisiveness.”

Want a Whole New Body? Ask This Flatworm How (Video)

“Planarians are tiny googly-eyed flatworms with an uncanny ability: They can regrow their entire bodies, even a new head. So how do they do it?” How strange.

Cape Town’s Slave Ship Secret

Here’s an interesting article about a new discovery. “The project set out to find the São José based on archival documents of the Dutch East India Company (which governed the Cape Colony until 1795) found in the Western Cape Archives and Records Service. These documents told the story of a Portuguese slave ship with 512 Mozambican slaves destined for Brazil that sank on 27 December 1794 in Camps Bay on the Cape Peninsula. Boshoff and his team started diving the area in search of the wreck, but found nothing.”

This gallery contains some amazing photos of God’s creation.

What Is the Apocrypha? (Video)

Dr. Robert Plummer tells about the Apocrypha in this new episode of Honest Answers.

Flashback: Things Christians Just Don’t Get To Do

As a Christian you do not get to have a pet sin, a peccadillo, a sin you refuse to confront through the power of the Holy Spirit. Every sin, no matter how small or precious it seems, is to be confronted and destroyed.

Jesus does what legalism can never do: he gives us a new heart and a new spirit.

—Tim Chester

  • The Pursuit of Virtue

    God’s character is the essence of virtue. The heart of virtue is to know the Lord and to become like him, as a child resembles her father. That is the goal, privilege, and destiny of the redeemed. #Sponsored

  • When God Plants an Acorn

    When God Plants an Acorn, He Means an Oak

    We stood together on the crest of a hill, a gentle breeze rustling the meadow around our feet. The fields ran gently downward until they met a creek that gurgled happily in its course. A few years prior, an acorn had somehow made its way to the highest point of this hill, carelessly dropped there…

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    A La Carte (April 28)

    A La Carte: Protestantism’s Catholic converts / How healthy is your pursuit of health? / God’s special calling on your life / Considering a Christian university? / Testing the teachings of Catholicism / Kindle deals / and more.

  • New and Notable

    New and Notable Christian Books for April 2025

    It is surprisingly difficult to find a list of Christian books that have been released in any given month—especially if you want that list to be filtered by books released through particular publishers. That’s one of the reasons why I close each month by coming up with my list of New and Notable books. I…

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    Weekend A La Carte (April 26)

    A La Carte: Every pinch of pain has purpose / China closed Christian bookstores / Watch for the thing after the thing / For everything there is a time / Showers of blessing / What Pope Francis can teach us about preaching / and more.