So, the word is out: On November 1, 325,000 copies of Anne Rice’s latest literary offering will be hitting the shelves. Big deal, right? Yes. When the main character is no longer a blood-sucking vampire but is, instead, the seven-year old, blood-shedding savior: Jesus Christ. (Listen to an audio excerpt at MSNBC.)
I was clued-in to this only a few hours ago (October 25), but already the blogosphere is heating up over her latest book, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, and the print media is not far behind. Sadly, the print outlets are exploring neither Rice’s 1998 conversion (“return”) to Catholic Christianity, nor the depths of her change—if any. If you’re up to the lackluster press, check out Newsweek|MSNBC’s “The Gospel According to Anne,” Canada.com’s review, “
In the spirit of my PneumaBlogs page, I’ve added another compilation of blog links to official Christianity Today blogs, links to unofficial personal CTI blogs, and links to ex-employees and affiliated CTI blogs. I hope you enjoy it. This is not an official list, it is not approved my employer, nor are all the links on this page representative of CTI opinion.
Christianity Today Blogs and Bloggers
[tags]BlogRodent, Christianity-Today, christianitytoday, CTI, Christianity-Today-International, blogs, bloggers, godblogs, writers, Christianity, Evangelical[/tags]
I’m popular on the Web! Well, maybe I’m just popular on Garrick Van Buren’s website. Or, maybe I’m just popular on one podcast on one podcaster’s show coming out of a small home in Minnesota that is redolent of freshly roasted coffee.
I had the pleasure of spending over an hour on Skype with Garrick of the “First Crack Podcast,” talking about his show, podcasting, the Internet, and more. It was a great conversation, and I’m looking forward to listening to his half-hour condensation our our hour-plus conversation.
I just had to say that now, before listening to the show, because I really enjoyed the conversation, and didn’t want to sully my good feelings with that sense of “Aargh! He left out the best part!” <grin> Garrick’s a good guy, and he has an interesting show, in my opinion. I frequently enjoy the
As I shared Blake Bergstrom’s “pitch his tents” experience with coworkers at Christianity Today (especially Preaching Today, where they got a big vicarious and empathetic kick out of it) I jokingly bemoaned the lack of well-known and well-salted preachers who had the grace to let their verbal gaffes get out there in wider distribution. “Wouldn’t it be great,” I fancied, “If we could collect a range of gaffes and Freudian slips like this from preachers we all know and love? I would buy that CD faster than Lot could pitch his tents!”
Well, we’re no closer to that pipe-dream today, but I did stumble across a verbal slips you might like.
The first made by one of America’s foremost preachers, John Ortberg (teaching pastor at Menlo Park Presbyterian Church). And he personally recounts the tale in his book
Okay, I wasn’t going to post merely frivolous stuff here, but this is far too precious to pass up.
You who preach … well. If you gotta slip up, go big.
Here’s a clip below of poor high school pastor Blake Bergstrom, who tried to work his way around a bit of a tongue twister as he introduced a sermon that might have already been doomed, based on his unusual use of metaphors. As you listen, just wait. No: the “light ourselves on fire so they can watch us burn” is not the gaffe you are listening for, surprisingly, but that imagery is bad enough that he might actually have improved his sermon with an extreme Freudian slip!
Here’s the audio:
[audio:http://tatumweb.com/blog/wp-content/mp3/blake-bergstrom-mistake.mp3]
(Here's the link if the flash player doesn't load.)
And Bergstrom has been good enough to actually release the video, which Kevin Rossen
I’ve been adding a few links here and there when I find them. So, check back to see what’s new. Also, I’ve updated the ordering of the list so that the newest items float to the top of the list.
PneumaBlog: Pentecostal & Charismatic & Assembly of God Blogs
[tags]BlogRodent, assemblies-of-god, assembly-of-god, blog, bloggers, charisma, charismatic, chi-alpha, church-of-god, division-of-foreign-missions, division-of-home-missions, evangelical, foursquare, gifts-of-the-spirit, glossolallia, holy-spirit, pastors, pentecostal, pentecostals, pneuma, pneumablog, pneumablogs, pneumatology, spirit, tongues, viral-blogs, weblog[/tags]
There’s an interesting interview just put out by my employer, Christianity Today International, that I think is worth reading. It’s an interview with Dallas Willard and Richard J. Foster conducted by Christianity Today associate editor Agnieszka Tennant: “The Making of the Christian: Richard J. Foster and Dallas Willard on the difference between discipleship and spiritual formation.”
I love this analyses by Dallas Willard regarding the current emptiness of the word “discipleship:”
“Discipleship as a term has lost its content, and this is one reason why it has been moved aside. … There are really three gospels that are heard in our society. One is forgiveness of sins. Another is being faithful to your church: If you take care of your church, it will take care of you. Sometimes it's called discipleship, but it's really churchmanship.
There’s a flap heating up the newspapers and blogosphere about the winning design for the Flight 93 Memorial to be built near Shanksville, Pa. The skinny is that architect Paul Murdoch submitted a design, the “Crescent of Embrace,” which bears an uncanny resemblance to the Islamic red crescent as seen on the flag of Tunisia.
The designer says the crescent shape was mere coincidence. He, apparently, wanted a soft symbol of openness to symbolize acceptance and embrace. I contend he was wildly successful. What better way to signify openness toward Islamic ideas and faith than by using a common Islamic symbol?
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Others have blogged pretty thoroughly on this. For more info, check out:
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Hi. I’ve performed some major updates to the
Pneumablogs page. I probably have too many personal journal-style blogs represented here, so over time some of the links may be dropping off. See, especially, my comments at the end of the page regarding “cat” blogs and “boss” blogs.
I took a few quizzes tonight, and I generously share the results with you, my Gentle Readers. I’m not sure what they really reveal about me. I worked as an opinion/market research interviewer for four years, and I know how very subtle changes in questions and their interpretation by the respondent can wildly skew results. But if you’re looking for a quick read on where I am theologically (or where you are, if you take the test) this may be helpful for you.
First, I went to QuizFarm and took the “What’s your theological worldview?” test. Here are the results.
| You scored as Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan. You are an evangelical in the Wesleyan tradition. You believe that God"s grace enables you to choose to believe in him, even though you yourself are totally depraved. The gift of the Holy Spirit gives you assurance of your |
I just received this from the General Council of the A/G:
--
From: Office of the General Secretary [churches@ag.org]
Sent: Wednesday, September 07, 2005 1:45 PM
Subject: A/G Hurricane Katrina Relief Efforts Update
The General Council of the Assemblies of God, together with the Convoy of Hope, continues to respond to the Hurricane Katrina disaster with acts of compassion and practical helps.
Convoy of Hope
As of today COH has distributed 75 truckloads of ice, water, food and other relief supplies with another 16 truckloads scheduled to arrive in the next couple of days. To date over 3.5 million pounds of life-sustaining relief materials have been distributed in the following communities:
Louisiana: Gretna (West bank of New Orleans)
Mississippi: Bay St. Louis, Biloxi, Caesar, Gulfport, Henryville, McComb, and Picayune
Convoy of Hope has ongoing distribution
Bill Whittle at “Eject! Eject! Eject!” has posted a brilliant, if sometimes crudely worded (R-Rated), post about the nature of white hats and black hats, pink and grey, or sheep, wolves, and sheep-dogs: TRIBES. It is a passionate, reasoned response to the aftermath of Katrina, the erosion of moral levees, and the shocking polar opposite of 9/11 heroism. Watching this, many of us struggle for answers: “Why?”
Bill’s post doesn’t offer a solution, but he does offer a perspective and a cultural critique that is thought-provoking. There’s no way I could do it justice by summarizing it. If you are not easily offended by coarse language, you should read it yourself. Bill is not a man of faith, his language is blue, but his passion is righteous.
Here’re the final grafs to tempt you:
It takes courage to fight oncoming storms. Courage.
Courage isn’t free. It is taught, taught by
Hi.
Here’s my current list of active Pentecostal, Charismatic and Assembly of God bloggers. I hope you enjoy it. And feel free to add to it with your comments.
PneumaBlogs: Select Pentecostal/Charismatic Bloggers
Rich.
[tags]assemblies-of-god, assembly-of-god, blogger, blogging, BlogRodent, charismatic, church-of-god, foursquare, god-blogger, god-blogging, godblog, godbloggers, godblogs, pentecostal, pneumablog, pneumabloggers, pneumablogging, pneumablogs, spirit-filled[/tags]
An interesting interview by Hugh Hewitt is available in transcript form, over at Radio Blogger. It’s worth the read, featuring commentary from his three guests, Biola University, Professor John Mark Reynolds; Louisville, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Dr. Albert Mohler; and Dr. Mark D. Roberts, theologian, author, pastor. There are no ground-breaking insights in the show transcript, but it’s a useful, brief, discussion of the problem of evil in the world and the proper Christian response to it.
One interesting point that I want to highlight was raised by John Mark Reynolds regarding a lot of the blame-casting that’s been going on about how slow the gummint has been to respond:
I … think we have a problem that's unique to our culture. And that is that people are used to information, and even money, changing hands very quickly.
Blog Feed Changes
For the approximately baker’s-dozen subscribers to the BlogRodent feed out there, I apologize for the frequent updates to my articles, and the recent change from the full text of the article to just summaries. I personally like receiving the full text feed, but I also worry about constantly resending the full text of articles you’ve already read just because I fixed a typo or uploaded an image. If you want the complete unexpurgated feed back, let me know. (Use the contact link in the navigation bar.)
As soon as I get over the novelty of a new blog and constantly fiddling with it (does it ever happen?), things should settle down to normal. Then you can happily read one or two half-baked posts a month.
Maybe.
Notification by Email
I’ve been working over the past couple of weeks with Scott Merrill, the developer of subscribe2, which provides the ability for
If you haven’t seen this site, yet, you should. If you ever refer to the Greek or Hebrew texts in your Bible studies or sermon prep, then you really owe it to yourself to check out this website:
zhubert.com
For Fellow Students of the Bible in the Original Languages
When you get there, just check out your favorite passage in whichever language you prefer. Once you see the passage in all its glorious original language splendor, you can click on a word and get the lexical root, it’s basic meaning, and a bit more. You can suggest additions (or “fix”) definitions, the related words, etc., and your entry will be considered. You can also see the word frequency count of both the inflected form of the word you’re studying, and all its appearances in the root form, and by clicking on the graphs, you can go directly
So, the word is out: On November 1, 325,000 copies of Anne Rice’s latest literary offering will be hitting the shelves. Big deal, right? Yes. When the main character is no longer a blood-sucking vampire but is, instead, the seven-year old, blood-shedding savior: Jesus Christ. (Listen to an audio excerpt at MSNBC.)
