truth about money

maybe you've seen this already (you may need to save this link to a file--it hangs sometimes when you try to stream it); but if you haven't, you ought to.

Truth comes from the strangest places sometimes

can you identify?

have you ever had that gnawing feeling while trying to be transparent that all it's accomplishing is giving others the opportunity to gawk?

this moment brought to you by Shamus' 3rd Birthday Party

avoiding dumb and dumber

I listened to an interview with one Mark Bauerlein an English Professor at Emory University on the MarsHill Audio journal last week. I know most of you are out of college, but since our learning doesn't end when we go through commencement (that's why they call it Commencement: you're BEGINNING!), you might consider how our media-saturation can really curtail how well we learn, which impacts how well we function in and contribute to society. Here's the essay upon which the interview was based.

Any comments?

perusing Da Vinci for the first time?

Here’s a short bibliography of works recommended by Dr. Bob Pyne (Prof of Systematic Theology, Dallas Theological Seminary) for those interested in all the hub-bub about The Da Vinci Code. It’s not so much a list of books for how to debunk its contents, but rather an invitation to learn how to engage the culture’s in its almost innate tendency to minimize the deity of Christ. It also offers some recommendations for Christian fiction that will cultivate (or renew) your appreciation for the fiction genre. (Fiction doesn’t always have to center on the rapture.)

prep for the spiritual colonoscopy

John Piper, as you may have heard, was recently operated on for prostate cancer. He's regularly referenced in this blog because he has become a kind of mentor in absentia to this blogger. He's on sabbatical studying in Cambridge, England (someone's got to do it, I guess) and he's beginning that studious rest it appears by returning to the Gospels.

Anyway, what's your first reaction to some of the sayings of Jesus that don't readily fit into your conception of Him? Piper provides a helpful exercise here for how to process (and that's a rather antiseptic way of putting it) some of those sayings that you're likely to dismiss at first as something Jesus wouldn't have said.

As one who's had a colonoscopy, I can say that anything that can make the process any less of a shock is a most welcome thing. Consider his few words here a preparation for the kind of spiritual colonoscopy Jesus' words are uniquely equipped to perform.