Randall Stephens [Cross posted at the THS blog .] I liked it when the AHA met in NYC last year. Better yet, this year it’s in sunny San Diego, a nice break from the cold, snow, slush, and raging swine flu of New England. (And I forgot to bring my wetsuit.) I spent part of Thursday reconnoitering the area and meeting with various friends in the profession
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Know Your Editor: Susan Ferber, Executive Editor, American and World History, Oxford University Press
I recently read a book about a certain denomination in this country (not important which denomination here), and it made an interesting observation. Over the course of a generation it seemed like there was a wholesale loss of confidence. This showed in evangelism, in church health, in preaching, etc. Today I was enjoying conversation with a friend who made a similar observation about the same denomination. A loss of confidence in Scripture, in our ability to understand it, and therefore in our ability to preach it. This raises the issue of confidence in preaching. Being self-confident is not the goal here. Our confidence has to be in God – in His Spirit, His Word, His work in us and others, His gifting. Tied into this is a certain level of confidence needed in our hermeneutics so that we are not grasping around trying to find “a message” instead of diligently and prayerfully pursuing “the message” in a passage
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Where Did the Confidence Go?
Paul Harvey Good stuff over at Immanent Frame: First, a little follow-up on Darren’s post from yesterday: ” Christianity and the Crash,” collects a number of scholarly responses to Hanna Rosin’s article ” Did Christianity Cause the Crash ,” from the December 2009 Atlantic . Our friends Anthea Butler and Jon Walton weigh in, along with Mark Taylor, Harvey Cox, and several others
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Christianity, Crashes, and Special Experiences
I admit I don’t pay as much attention to the news as I should, (it’s typically so depressing), so it came as a surprise when I learned via the 2009 Harper’s Magazine Yearly Review that in August of last year, a law was passed in Afghanistan allowing wives who refuse their husband’s sexual advances to be starved. No, we haven’t fallen into a time warp and landed in the middle ages.
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Legalized rape in Afghanistan?
Here is a little of what Photographer Dan Bodenstein writes about the photo’s subject, Eartha the sea turtle : I visited Eartha at the Loggerhead Marinelife Center in Juno Beach Florida. Eartha was very photogenic. She would swim right up to the glass in her tank as I positioned myself infront of it for a photograph
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(Almost) Wordless Wednesday: I Got A Turtle Head Poking Out!
I present miscellany, each bullet item less worthwhile than the last: Given that CNN has bothered to pretend that New Year’s Eve celebrations in big cities are worth sending celebrities to preside over, the boundary they’ve drawn around the pretense makes no sense. They are shocked, shocked! that their chosen celebrity co-presider, Kathy Griffin, said a dirty word
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Nothing to See Here
New Online New on All Considering A year of spiritual blogging: time for some statistics Merry Christmas Michael Mirdad interview The five stages of the soul transformation process: Michael Mirdad New on squidoo Quiz: Dalai Lama facts and trivia You’re Not Going Crazy…You’re Just Waking Up! Michael Mirdad Quiz: Wicca and Paganism facts and trivia A Course in Miracles – famous quotes and sayings Buddhist Texts Through the Ages A World Full Of Gods : The History of Early Christianity New: My spiritual Quotes Blavatsky Christmas and New Year Quotes Theravada Buddhist quotes about happiness Inspiring science quotes about Happiness The rest of my spiritual newsletter containing: Short Quotes, Editorial and Clara Codd on the Yoga of Motherhood.
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Spiritual Quotes, Buddhist texts, ACIM, You’re not crazy and Quizzes…
Checklist: thermal tights, gloves, hat, boots, shovel, ice pick. Ring the plumber to remind him that the boiler hasn’t been working for the past three days, spend an hour scraping ice off the car with your fingers before discovering that the school is closed, turn round, inch your way back and slip on the steps before taking a binbag up the nearest hill
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Avatar, not Ed, will make the case on climate
I do love a good maid café: where the waitresses dress as stylised comic-book serving girls from some indeterminate era of 18th-century Franco-German history and the clientele are Tokyo’s nerdy weirdos. There’s just something nice about being served mediocre coffee by a neo-Gothic wench who charges a fiver to beat you at Connect Four.
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Nerdy cafés no longer maid in heaven
A dozen operators sit transfixed staring at TV monitors in a dingy room at the back of a Heathrow terminal. Protected by thickened glass to shut out the thundering clatter of a rolling conveyor belt laden with line after line of suitcases, they watch for suspicious objects as they pass through their X-ray machine.
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Forget body scans: search the right people