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…)
A friend of mine visited my house, an English teacher clearly unhappy with her day. One of her teenage students had rubbished her lesson and the novel they were studying to another teacher. In the staff room there was general consensus that, though my friend is a great teacher, the book was totally unsuitable for boys because the lead character is a teenage girl. Gosh, of course they should forget about the book and watch the movie version instead. After all, a teenager wouldn’t be able to discover the mind or world of another person within the pages of a book! That would be way too demanding; they’d better just watch the movie.
When Timothy was exercising responsibility over the Ephesian church, the apostle Paul instructed him as follows: “Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching” (1 Tim 4:13). Although this was to be a temporary role for Timothy (“until I come”), it presumably outlived him in the life of the church; that is, when the apostle wrote “until I come”, he was not suggesting that the practice itself would be temporary, only that his own arrival would mark the end of Timothy’s personal responsibility to fight for and guarantee these practices. (more…)
You knock on the door of the dingy inner city terrace. You probably did see a whole lot of Harley Davidsons outside on the footpath, but obviously you weren’t thinking. The door opens, and now you see a room full of leather-clad, patch-emblazoned, hairy types of the bike-riding persuasion. You were supposed to invite the happy householder to a gospel thingy at the local church. If you go along with that plan, you suddenly see a different future stretching out before you—and it doesn’t seem to stretch that far. (more…)
“I enjoyed your sermon this morning, but it was just too long. In this day and age, with shorter attention spans, you just can’t preach for longer than 20 minutes. For all our sakes, you just have to make it shorter. Anything longer than that is counter-productive!”
Chuck Colson’s website, BreakPoint online, ran an interview with the author Connie Neal, who has written a book called What’s A Christian to Do with Harry Potter? (discussed below). Soon afterwards, he published a disclaimer, saying that he did not “encourage Christian parents to encourage their children to see the movie or read the books” because “there is much better literature available for children with less potential to lead people into the occult”. This seemed to run counter to an earlier piece by Colson (se p.14 of Neal’s book) which spoke positively of the books’ value for children.
My most vivid recollection of 5th class is of my teacher, Peter Harwin, perched on his desk, reading aloud from the collected stories of Sherlock Holmes. I remember looking around and seeing boys sprawled face down on their desks while this fresh-faced teacher brought to life another spine-chilling instalment of ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’. When the hour was over, he would close the book and the class would suddenly rouse from its apparent slumber and beg him to continue. It was all in vain, for he was a master at keeping boys in suspense. It was sweet agony.