Today’s Kindle deals include several good titles that may be worth adding to your growing collection!
Here’s a reminder of Logos’ back to school sale which offers 20% off base packages (which is about the biggest discount I’ve seen them offer). Click here, then use the coupon code challies8. You’ll also get to pick a few free books that way.
(Yesterday on the blog: The Ministry of Presence)
The Church is a Means of Grace
I completely agree with the big point of this article (even though I don’t see things through quite so Presbyterian a lens!). “The local congregation in its entirety, where each has been gifted by the Spirit for the benefit of others, is regularly used by the Spirit for our salvation and sanctification in Christ.”
If You Want Your Kids to Own Their Faith, Teach Them to Think Critically about Their Faith
“I think this is one of the reasons why many Christian kids grow up and abandon ‘their’ beliefs. For many of them, those beliefs were never theirs in the first place. They were their parent’s beliefs that the kids were taught to memorize and regurgitate, beliefs the kids were never challenged to think through for themselves. So, how do we do that? How do we get our kids to think for themselves about Christian truths? Well, it’s not complicated. We need to stop only asking the ‘what’ questions and start asking the ‘why’ questions.”
The Day Robert Mugabe Died…
I was hoping a Zimbabwean Christian would write about the death of Robert Mugabe, and was glad to see Bruce Itai Chimani come through. “We all can talk about Mugabe in very abstract ways and I want to talk about him in very personal and specific terms. That man affected me. He affected us. And this is my lived reality which I can never undo, and which I will not allow anyone to explain away.”
Robert Alter on Why Modern Bible Translations Should Stay in the King James Stream
Justin Taylor is so good at digging up little nuggets like this one. “One of his arguments is that modern translations have made a misstep by not remaining within the historic stream of the King James Bible tradition. Here is his explanation of what he means…”
What Really Brought Down the Boeing 737 Max?
Hopefully you’ve got at least one of your free NY Times articles left this month to read this long but fascinating article on the 737 MAX and what really went wrong.
What You Share When You Show Christian Hospitality
There’s more to it than just chatting with people in a comfortable setting.
Salvation by Ideas? God Forbid!
Bruce Lowe: “How are we saved? Is it through believing a fact of history, i.e. that Jesus died on the cross for our sins? Or does salvation occur through a deep personal relationship of trust in Jesus? If we say ‘both’, we run the risk of avoiding the issue, leaving people to fend for themselves in working out the balance. For many–maybe most–this will mean landing hard on the side of intellectual assent, because when we think of ‘believe’ in English, we often mean ‘assent’.”
Flashback: The Joys (and the Limitations) of Male-Female Friendships
While the language of the spiritual family describes something genuine—we are bound together in Jesus Christ—we need to remember that it is also metaphorical.
The world does worldliness better than the church does, no matter how hard we try. If we want to please the world by being like the world, we lose.
—Mark Dever
