At Garnett today, we did a combo baby dedication/mother’s day celebration. It seemed to fit together really well. I also started a series of teachings where I’m going to interact with UnChristian and They Like Jesus but not the Church. Two very good books that I predict will generate some good discussion and reflection.
I finished […]

I’m doing some reading about atonement theory.
I’ve got A Community Called Atonement, Recovering the Scandal of the Cross, and Atonement for a ‘Sinless’ Society.
Any other ideas?
It’s interesting to me that while all Christians agree that we are saved by Jesus’ death on the cross, we can’t agree upon a unified theory for explaining […]

Listen up preacher geeks. I’ve got a book recommendation for you.
Check out Chris Erdman’s Countdown to Sunday.
I usually read about one book on preaching a year and this is my book for 2007.
It’s really a collection of essays on preaching that are loosely related. There is some practical text to sermon stuff and there’s some […]

Dumbledore may be gay, but Harry appears to be a Christian.
Rowling’s discussion about the religious themes, especially those of the Christian sort, in HP has been lost in the hubbub about Dumbledore’s sexual orientation.
Good quotes:
(SPOILER ALERT! The rest of this story discusses the conclusion of “Deathly Hallows.”)
That was the plan from the start, Rowling told […]

Just finished The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations.
It’s a quick read with some great stories comparing decentralized and centralized organizations.
Here is the book description:
If you cut off a spider’s leg, it’s crippled; if you cut off its head, it dies. But if you cut off a starfish’s leg it grows […]

This is from The Paradox of Choice.
When people have no choice, life is almost unbearable. As the number of available choices increases, as it has in our consumer culture, the autonomy, control, and liberation this variety brings are powerful and positive. But as the number of choices keeps growing, negative aspects of having a multitude […]

No time to blog right now. . .
I’m within a hundred pages of being done with Harry Potter. . .
Can’t stop reading. . .
Will be useless until it’s finished. . .
Update: I finished last night/this morning at 1 AM. What a fantastic ending to a well told story.

Check out this new book by my friend Fred Peatross.  Fred is a great thinker and writer who knows how to challenge what we think we already know.

By the way, Fred is the only person on my “A Few of My Friends” blogroll to the right that I haven’t met personally.  We’ve been interacting via […]

Back in May I blogged a bit from The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz.
I’ve found it to be a fascinating book that deserves more than one post.
One of the reasons I’ve enjoyed reading it is because Schwartz gives me this kind of stuff to think about.
One study of regret had participants read the […]

When I’m on vacation, one of the rules I follow with the strictness of a Pharisee is that I don’t read books with footnotes.  I read enough of those already.
Instead I read books that having nothing to with real life. I don’t want to think.  I don’t want my vocabulary enriched.  I don’t want to […]