flickr: Abee5
If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s forgetting. Your name. What I did on the weekend. The experiences of last year. Gone, every one.
I used to read Christian books and forget them. In one sense, that’s no big deal: we all forget, and it doesn’t mean we haven’t learned anything. But I also wasn’t absorbing what I read: crystallizing the key points, tasting the sweet, going away informed and transformed. That takes a different kind of reading. (more…)
These are troubling times in the book business. As I sit down to write this month’s Resource Talk, the dust is still settling after the financial collapse of the owner of two of Australia’s largest bookselling chains. The management is blaming a mix of factors: the high Australian dollar, the rise of online retailing (whereby customers can buy books cheaper and tax-free from overseas), the heavy discounting tactics of department stores, the global financial crisis, and the rise of the ebook.
Some parents resent being the taxi driver. I offer to do it whenever I can. When else do your teenagers actually consent to sit within 10 metres of you, let alone talk to their friends while you listen? And besides, the opportunity to pay out their appalling music and inflict your own Classic Hits and Memories upon them is too much to resist. (more…)
One of the more fascinating books I read last year had the ironic title The Book is Dead. Long Live the Book. It was a book seeking to persuade me that books are history. (more…)
From the bountiful crop of recent books on church, Chris Green looks at three well worth reading.
Total Church: A radical reshaping around gospel and community (more…)
The Old Evangelicalism: Old truths for a new awakening
Iain H Murray
Banner of Truth Trust, Edinburgh, 2005, 226pp.
Recent debates in my circles (about the nature of the Trinity, and about who is suitable to be ordained or to preside at the Lord’s Supper) show an uneasy footing with regard to theologians of the past. Sometimes we are keen to legitimate our standing in the apostolic tradition, and so we selectively cite those earlier divines who shared our opinions. Sometimes we confer on some past thinker a godlike authority, and then proceed to marry our thoughts precisely to theirs. Sometimes we are so convinced of an historically eccentric view, we ignore all our forebears, rebuffing them with a cry of “Sola scriptura!” (more…)
Sometimes it can seem futile preaching the Bible week in and week out. But, as Gary Koo discovers, it’s the most important thing God wants you to do as a pastor. (more…)
