33. Woody Allen and Billy Graham together? While it may sound like a meeting in an alternative universe, Ann Althouse has found a charming video clip of Allen interviewing Graham.
32. Ever argue with someone about whether a quote is from Shakespeare or the Bible?" To settle such disputes use Shakespeare Searched, a search engine designed to provide quick access to passages from Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, and BibleGateway.com, which provides numerous translations of the Bible to choose from.
31. Holding hands is increasingly seen as a sign of commitment and intimacy, while more seemingly intimate acts like kissing and sex are more likely to occur earlier in a "relationship". (HT: Kottke.org)
30. Donald Rumsfeld's Rules: Advice on Government, Business & Life
29. Abortion's Dead Poets Society (HT: The A-Team)
28. Paintings to see before you die
27. Video: Man tries to jump the mile-wide St. Lawrence River in a rocket-powered Lincoln Continental.
One part of clarity sometimes missed by earnest evangelists, however, is the willingness to offend. Clarity with the claims of Christ certainly will include the translation of the Gospel into words that our hearer understands, but it doesn’t necessarily mean translating it into words that our hearer will like. Too often advocates of relevant evangelism verge over into being advocates of irrelevant non-evangelism. A gospel which in no way offends the sinner has not been understood.
(HT: Between Two Worlds)
25. Learning to Glorify God through the Enjoyment of Jazz [MP3] ((HT: Intellectuelle)
24. 20 Things You Didn't Know About Death:
#3 No American has died of old age since 1951. That was the year the government eliminated that classification on death certificates.
#6 Within three days of death, the enzymes that once digested your dinner begin to eat you. Ruptured cells become food for living bacteria in the gut, which release enough noxious gas to bloat the body and force the eyes to bulge outward.
#20 It is estimated that 100 billion people have died since humans began.
(HT: Boing Boing)
23. Alan from The Thinklings asks, "Homeschooling: Does God Oppose It?"
22. Top 10 Best Presentations Ever
21. Daniel Drezner on the term "Islamofascist": “Maybe, just maybe, radical Islam is a kind of sui generis phenomenon that would be best understood on its own terms rather than desperately trying to glom it onto secular totalitarian ideologies of the past” (HT: PoliBlog)
20. Top 15 Finds from Biblical Archaeology (HT: Between Two Worlds)
19. Arnold King on the leadership myth and democracy: "Democracy does not lead to particularly good choices. Most successful institutions in society are not democratic." (HT: Outside the Beltway)
18. I find this meme, based on a line which originated from the PC Game "Command and Conquer" ("I am in your base killing your d00ds"), indefensibly stupid. Yet for some odd reason, when it includes a cat, a parrot, or a House Speaker, it makes me giggle. (Examples: 1, 2, 3, 4) (HT: Boing Boing)
17. How to Scan Read
16. "The essence of the Christian religion consists in this, that the creation of the Father, devastated by sin, is restored in the death of the Son of God, and recreated by the Holy Spirit into the kingdom of God." -- Herman Bavinck, Gereformeerde Dogmatiek, as cited in Michael Williams, Far as the Curse Is Found. (HT: Between Two Worlds)
15. What your Blog Juice?
14. 78% of all Protestants in Brazil self-identify as Pentecostal or charismatic, while 73% of Kenyans do. As wholes, both South America and Africa are hotbeds of growth by both groups. (HT: Cerulean Sanctum)
13. In an article titled "We're All Big Babies" (which includes advice on "How to Be an Adult"), Michael Bywater includes this intriguing observation: "My grandfather was born in 1888 and he didn't have a lifestyle. He didn't need one: he had a life."
12. Walter Russell Mead. a Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, on Evangelicals and Foreign Policy
11. Victor Davis Hanson on the new enemies of reason: "The new enemies of Reason are not the enraged democrats who executed Socrates, the Christian zealots who persecuted philosophers of heliocentricity, or the Nazis who burned books. No, they are a pampered and scared Western public that caves to barbarism — dwarves who sit on the shoulders of dead giants, and believe that their present exalted position is somehow related to their own cowardly sense of accommodation." (HT: Maverick Philosopher)
10. Genealogy of Influence -- a graph of biographical entries at Wikipedia with connections denoting creative influence between philosophers, social scientists, writers, artists, scientists, mathematicians.
9. From Peter Leithart, Against Christianity, p. 47.
(9) Theology is a “Victorian” enterprise, neoclassically bright and neat and clean, nothing out of place.
Whereas the Bible talks about hair, blood, sweat, entrails, menstruation and genital emissions.
(10) Here’s an experiment you can do at any theological library. You even have my permission to try this at home.
Step 1: Check the indexes of any theologian you choose for any of the words mentioned in the section 9 above. (Augustine does not count. Augustine’s theology is as big as reality, or bigger.)
Step 2: Check the Bible concordance for the same words.
Step 3: Ponder these questions: Do theologians talk about the world the same way the Bible does? Do theologians talk about the same world the Bible does?
(HT: The Thinklings)
8. Five Years of Consequence (PDF)
7. William F. Vallicella on logic:
Logic is not to be denigrated, nor is it to be overestimated. It is an excellent vehicle for safe travel among concepts and propositions. It will save us from many an error and perhaps even lead us to a few truths. But it cannot move us beyond the plane of concepts and propositions. It aids safe passage from thought to thought, but cannot transport us to the source of thoughts, their thinker, the transcendental condition without which there would not be any thoughts.
6. Three constitutions: The European, the American and the Icelandic constitutions.
5. Melinda Penner on How to Blog Winsomely.
4. Macht on the problem with proofs:
A proof is to an argument as a table of contents is to a book. As table of contents the proof can help us get our bearings on a problem but all too often the proof is treated as the book itself, especially by the novice. The problem with proofs is that they very often function as the end, when they should be the beginning. That is, a proof should serve as an introduction to a problem, not the solution to a problem.
2. Blaise Pascal on the soul:
The immortality of the soul is something of such vital importance to us, affecting us so deeply, that one must have lost all feeling not to care about knowing the facts of the matter. All our actions and thoughts must follow such different paths, according to whether there is hope of eternal blessing or not, that the only possible way of acting with sense and judgment is to decide our course in the light of this point, which ought to be our ultimate objective.
HT: Paul Spears of Middlebrow, who has more thoughts on the subject.
1. A brief history of the "Head of Christ,"...
...one of the most ubiquitous and kitschy paintings in Christendom.
haven't had time to read all 33 things, but that post about abortion's dead poet's society is particularly poignant.
Abortion is the issue that pushed me over the edge. I was really a moderate before--sometimes voting Dem, sometimes voting Repub. I always believed abortion was wrong, but it was not that important to me. What pushed me over the edge to the Republican side was the notion of people supporting abortion rights--when my wife and I discovered we were not able to have biological children. The term unwanted pregnancy took on a completely different meaning. It became personal. I started screaming every time I heard it: DON'T TELL ME ABOUT UNWANTED PREGNANCIES. THERE'S NO SUCH THING!!!! Unwanted pregnancy was a cold slap in my face.
I'M STILL NOT SURE HOW IMPORTANT THE ISSUE OF ABORTION IS TO ME. However, I cannot understand how anyone can be proud of fighting for and standing for a right like abortion. And before anyone responds to this post, please realize that abortion rights remains the central plank of the Democrat party. Many people on the left live and die on protection of abortion rights. What a legacy.
Joe,
Thanks for including my Cerulean Sanctum post about the growth of Pentecostals and charismatics in your excellent list.
Blessings!
Item #9 reflects a serious misunderstanding of what theology is supposed to be. Theology is the science of God - the rational investigation of what we know about him. Now, in every other area, everyone knows that science is useful, even important, even totally indispensible, while also understanding that the science of something is not, and is not supposed to be, the total reality of that thing. The science of nutrition does not feed you, but that doesn't mean it's useless.
But with theology everything is somehow different. People expect theology to convey the total reality of God, and if it doesn't, they reject it as useless and even harmful.
C.S. Lewis hit the nail on the head in that classic chapter defending theology in Mere Christianity. It's the first chapter of the last section of the book. He puts it this way: standing on the beach looking at the ocean gives you more of the reality of the ocean than looking at a map of it. But if you want to CROSS the ocean, you're darn well going to need the map, and it's no use complaining that the map is just a drawing on a piece of paper that doens't convey the reality, etc.
Where would Leithart be if theologians hadn't figured out for him the doctrines of the trinity, the atonement, justification, etc.?
Number 11 was right on the money.
#1
It was ubiquitous in my home and my church when I was growing up. I never knew the history of it before. Thanks.
I do remember when I was still in grade school questioning the idea of Jesus being portrayed with brown hair and a very Western European look.
Thanks for number 5.