Countdown to Sunday

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 […]

Harry Potter the Christian

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 Starfish and the Spider

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 […]

The Tyranny of Choice

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 […]

Storytime

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.

Missio Dei

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 […]

What You Regret

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 […]

No Footnotes

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 […]

Mental Accounting

In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz asks an interesting pair of questions: Imagine that you have decided to see a concert where admission is $20 a ticket. As you enter the concert hall, you discover that you have lost a $20 bill. Would you still pay $20 for a ticket to the concert? Schwartz […]

The Answer to How is Yes Part 3

In The Answer to How is Yes, Peter Block suggests six questions that will take us in a much different direction than the usual How? questions. Before we get to the questions, here are a few introductory comments from Block. “The alternative to asking How? is saying Yes–not literally, but as a symbol of our […]