Occasionally I use a Friday article to take care of a few things that have been on my mind. I’m going to do that today.
A Media Junkie
Joe Carter is a media junkie. You can read about his media obsession right here. He took an inventory of his media consumption and found he reads “one daily newspaper, 12 magazines, and over 300 RSS feeds.” And even then he reads far more magazines than he subscribes to.
I do not subscribe to any newspapers, despite their best efforts to get me to do so. I think newspapers call more often than any other telemarketers trying to get me to subscribe. It must be desperate times. I subscribe to two magazines and intend to let both of them lapse when my subscriptions run out. I read People magazine when I forget to take a book when going to the doctor or for a haircut. I have found that newspapers and magazines are no longer a compelling source of information. I miss the analysis they provide, but see no other reason to subscribe to them anymore. I do, though, subscribe to 100 RSS feeds or so and I do enjoy skimming those headlines looking for nuggets of gold. Some I read for pleasure, some for information and some out of habit.
How do you consume media today? How much do you consume?
Dear America
Dear America. Please stop complaining about everything.
Sincerely,
Tim from Canada
(I mean, seriously, is there a country in the world that is greater than the U.S. but which breeds such discontent among its people?)
Keller, Chopra, Tolle
Tim Keller’s The Reason for God is, as predicted, rising up the bestseller charts. It’s currently #6 on the Amazon “Spirituality” chart (and #41 overall), sandwiched between Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra. If Oprah hadn’t recently praised Tolle, taking several of his titles far up the charts, Keller would be higher still.
When I was traveling a couple of weeks ago, I was reading Keller’s book and was surprised to see how many people stared at the cover. A couple stopped short to stare at it, though I was on the phone at the time and couldn’t converse with them. But I’m thinking the book is going to be a great conversation starter. There is such a hunger for spirituality in our day and this book may held lead many people to the One they need.
Jesus in Love
As you may know, novelist Anne Rice recently returned to the Catholic Church and subsequently gave up writing about vampires in favor of writing a series of books on the life of Jesus. I just finished reading the second in this series, Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana. Like any dramatization of the life of Jesus, this one takes liberties and artistic license. It also gets many facts just plain wrong, something I’ll cover in my review next week. But in the meantime, it raised an interesting question.
Much of the story involves the relationship between Jesus, the year before he began his public ministry, and a young woman who wants to be married to Him. Jesus’s family cannot understand why He does not marry and neither does the community around Him. Rice (wrongly, I’m convinced) chooses to portray Jesus as only slowly coming to the realization of His deity, and Jesus is sometimes confused and conflicted by His human desires. He desperately desires to know the intimacy of love, but somehow knows that it is something He will have to forsake because of His unique calling. So this young woman begs Him to love her and He, with great pain, refuses her. This is one of the main plot lines in Rice’s second book.
So what do you think? Did Jesus ever fall in love? Could Jesus have fallen in love? Would His humanity allow Him to feel such things, or would His deity protect Him from a broken heart? Why or why not?
