Me: Look! The University of Pennsylvania has a giant picture of a black scientist on the homepage.
Wife: And it says “integrating”.
My Review
The primary goal of this book, by DTS professor Ronald Allen, is to open up the Psalms as a guide to worship. The preface opens with a list of focuses that evangelical churches have pursued over the years: evangelism, bible teaching, compassion. We “merely assumed worship would happen,” he says.
And we have done well. Not that we have done all that needs to be done, but we have been about our Father’s business…Yet we had not made much of worship. (11)
To Dr. Allen the Psalter is the finest guide to worship we possess, and he does a fine job of demonstrating this to be true.
And I Will Praise Him is a simple and helpful guide in how to read the various types of psalms and how they can be used to enhance our worship; in fact, how they can be used as the basis and most basic example of worship. Read more
When an author is trying to convince you that something means what you know it doesn’t, they’ll often go to the dictionary for support.
How can a virtual church be [a local church]? Glad you asked. If you look up the word local in the dictionary, it means “belonging to or existing in a particular place,” or more specifically, “of or belonging to the neighborhood.” [...]
Local churches are local not because of geography but because they are one specific group belonging to a place of seeking after God together.
From SimChurch
By this point the author has already redefined place in a way that includes “virtual spaces”, like a neighborhood in Second Life, so by saying that local is about place, he can reasonably conclude that a congregation that exists only in cyberspace is a true “local church”.
But is the dictionary definition really the best way to go about this? It seems problematic to me, and I expect others are uncomfortable with it as well. Read more
My Review
J.I. Packer is a theological giant in Reformed circles. Because I’ve only just become aware of reformed theology over the last three years or so, through the preaching of Mark Driscoll and Matt Chandler, I hadn’t read any of his work. Last weekend I read Knowing God, and I wish I’d read it sooner.
Packer originally wrote this as a series in Evangelical Magazine, and it was published as a book in 1973. By the time the second edition was printed twenty years later, it had sold over 1 million copies. I’m not sure how many have sold in the last 16 years, but I imagine more than a few.
This is by far the most powerful devotional book I’ve ever read. It convicted me time after time, and brought out some latent beliefs and misconceptions that I was completely unaware of.
My Review
I’ve loved Greek mythology since I first read the stories of Icarus and Narcissus. At some point in childhood I’d memorized the pantheon, the associated Roman names, and the slight differences between the Greek and Roman versions. Even Kevin Sorbo couldn’t ruin these stories for me.
So when my brother-in-law and I were seeing Avatar and I saw a preview for a movie about a young demigod, I was immediately intrigued. My family spends quite a bit of time in the children’s section of the local Barnes & Noble (they have a huge Thomas train set that my son adores), so I recognized the title of the series, Percy Jackson & the Olympians. I usually prefer to read the book before I see the movie when I can, so I picked it up.
This story bears quite a few similarities to Harry Potter—hardly a surprise considering the success of that series—but quite a few differences as well.(possible spoilers after the jump)
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What I'm Reading
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The Golden City
John Twelve Hawks
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Creating Significant Learning Experiences
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Simply Christian
N. T. Wright
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Trinitarian Controversy (Sources of Early Christian Thought)
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Moneyball
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My Delicious Feed- On Resenting Anne Jackson January 12, 2010Little did my reader know that as she wrote “compare and contrast” essays about me in her head, I was writing “compare and contrast” essays about Anne Jackson in my head. Little did she know that published authors are just as insecure and jealous and frightened as unpublished authors, sometimes even more so. Little did she know that my relative success in th […]
- Advanced Imaging Reveals a Computer 1,500 Years Ahead of Its Time - Technology - io9 January 8, 2010In 1900, some divers found the wreck of a Roman vessel off the Greek island of Antikythera. Among the other treasures remanded to the Greek government was an unassuming corroded lump. Some time later, the lump fell apart, revealing a damaged machine of unknown purpose, with some large gears and many smaller cogs, plus a few engraved words in Greek. Early stu […]
- Don't play with that, or you'll go blind - Steamboats Are Ruining Everything January 8, 2010James Cameron's 3-D movie Avatar gave me a four-hour headache. Probably the headache was caused by a combination of the 3-D effect, a seat near the front and at the far edge of the theater, the way the 3-D glasses skewed my plain old glasses beneath, and the dark in which I biked home afterward, my bike light having been stolen while I was in the theate […]
- Why there is no iTunes for movies. - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine December 28, 2009So why won't anyone in Hollywood build my service? The reason isn't stupidity. When I called people in the industry this week, I found that many in the movie business understand that online distribution is the future of media. But everything in Hollywood is governed by a byzantine set of contractual relationships between many different kinds of com […]
- On Resenting Anne Jackson January 12, 2010