A La Carte (October 26)

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.”

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.”