I have been coming across a lot of good reading material lately, and I thought I would share it with the community:
Trevin Wax has been conducting a multi-post interview with Andy Crouch (senior editor at Christianity Today International) about an important topic for missional Christians: culture. Andy’s thesis is this: "The way to change culture is to create more of it." Here are the various posts: (1) What is "the culture?" (2) Evangelical culture-making, (3) Critiquing culture, (4) Conservation, (5) Beware of World-changers, and (6) Response to John Seel.
Michael Kruse, a business analyst and devout Christian, has some thoughts about marketing, branding, and the church: (1) Marketing the Church? (2) Economic Metaphors and the Church, and (3) Church as a Family Business.
On that note, Richard L. Reising (creator of the What if Starbucks Marketed Like the Church? video) has a great post explaining why a church should not advertise itself unless it is worth advertising. (A welcoming environment and real life transformation must come first.) Check it out: The Miraculous Mailer.
Mark Driscoll has a few words we all need to hear concerning worship.
Edith M. Humphrey (associate professor of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary) has one of the most thorough and thoughtful articles I have read explaining why marriage is a male-female union. It is firm without being judgmental. Here it is on Christianity Today’s website (published way back in 2004): What God Hath Not Joined.
This article is hard to read, but we need to read it: If This Isn't Slavery, What Is? New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof tells the story of a girl named Pross who escaped from the sex slave trade in Cambodia, and he explains why the era of America’s first black President is the ideal time for leading a 21st-century abolitionist movement on behalf of the estimated 27 million slaves in our world today (80% of them women and over half of them minors).
To wrap up on a lighter note, do you speak 2009? "Want to stay in the loop for the next 12 months but are worried that you won't understand the lingo? David Randall reveals the words and phrases you'll need to keep your street cred intact this year." (Yes, this is from a website in the
Here are some examples to whet your appetite:
Co-rumination: Excessive chattering about problems, real and imagined. Leads to the amplification of real anxieties, and creation of new ones. Has increased markedly in recent years, as email, messaging, texting, and Facebook have given the self-obsessed a multitude of outlets.
BlackBerry prayer: The hunched-over, self-absorbed pose adopted by those fingering their Blackberry, or texting on their mobile. Often accompanied by facial expressions to match tenor of the message being sent.
Staycation: A vacation without the travelling. Or the expense. Or the tan.
Posts
1 comment:
Nice roundup! Another interesting read is Carl Trueman's Why Are There Never Enough Parking Spaces at the Prostate Clinic suggesting that we perhaps spend too much time thinking on and discussing ephemeral culture rather than transcendent truth. (This is perhaps related in some way to the topic of teaching and reflection at Regen this coming Sunday?)
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