I have a podcast on my “favorites” list from Dr. Al Mohler, president of Southern Seminary, the flagship divinity school for the Southern Baptist Convention. I’ve heard him preach a number of times at our former church, Capitol Hill Baptist, which we attended from 1999 to our move here in 2009. He’s a great guy for whom I have great respect and is very much concerned about the direction our society is going, but sometimes this concern causes him to overreact a little. So back when the whole drag-queen story-hour brouhaha broke out (and if you missed out on that one, lucky you! I’m a committed David Frenchian on the subject), Dr. Mohler saw it as a “cultural crisis.” We all needed to Do Something About It. But the thing of it was, and is, that these events are local and non-compulsory. Giving so much attention to them vaulted the performers into the spotlight for weeks.
Christian
Should you become part of the Brady Bunch?
Hi folks!
I should have posted this right after the Super Bowl, when (sigh) Tom Brady pulled it out yet again. At least everybody said it was the most boring SB ever. I don’t care much for Tom Brady—can you tell? Of course, one might ask, “Who asked you, Debi?” And I give him full, full props for his total unflappability and steel under fire. Hey, arrogance has its upside.
Anyway, though, I hadn’t realized that Mr. Brady, just like every other celebrity on the planet, has his own very special diet plan with his own very special science. Well, it’s actually his guru who has all
The Four Tendencies and Food–What I Talked About this Weekend at Camp
I just had a wonderful weekend at Camp Elim, a Christian camp near Colorado Springs, where I was privileged to speak in a couple of workshops. My two topics were “What’s Your Tendency?”, an examination of Gretchen Rubin’s theory about the four ways that people respond to expectations, and “How Food Fads and Myths Can Harm You,” in which I took on some of the current ideas floating around in the eating theories world, with a few side trips into my views on alternative medicine. I may get myself into trouble with that second one! My actual group for that session was small as I was competing with a very popular one on marriage, and they all seemed very receptive to my ideas. I gave everyone who attended the sessions the opportunity to sign up for a resources page, so I decided to just turn that material into a post for all my readers to access. Here ’tis:
Time Refuses to Be Managed.
Today I sat down to go through an accumulation of notes I’ve taken over the past couple of years, mostly from sermons at my church and lectures at Bible Study Fellowship. I was particularly looking for ideas that I’d scribbled down in the margins about possible blog posts, while also reminding myself of the wonderful spiritual truths that have been showered down upon me from various speakers. I don’t know that I intended to spend quite as much time as I did, but now I have a manageable little pile of notepaper with various areas highlighted. So I decided to go with the idea that ended up on top, quoted above. Here’s the entire quotation:
I Can See Clearly Now!
I wrote in a previous post about my identification with Teddy Roosevelt’s poor vision and his utter amazement when he got his first pair of glasses. I’d be interested to know how his vision problems progressed as he got older. Since Benjamin Franklin was the inventor of bifocals, I’d assume that TR at least had that feature available to him. And there were some primitive contact lenses as early as the late 1800’s, although it doesn’t appear that he ever wore those.
A Partially-Consumed but Worthwhile Book
Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved
I heard about this book from an episode of “Fresh Air Weekend” that kept me sitting in the parking lot of a restaurant recently and made me decide that I must get hold of it immediately. So I used one of my Audible.com credits to get the audiobook, thinking that I’d love it as much as I had the interview. I was going to plunge into it and not emerge until I was finished. It was going to be great.
Well, not so much.
I managed to get through about half of the audiobook, finding myself less and less willing to get back into it. Finally, yesterday, I started it again and then thought, ‘I can’t do any more of this.’ I may or may not go back and listen to the final couple of chapters, but I’m done with the ongoing story.
A Weighty Book on a Weighty Subject
The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
“The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” So begins this monumental work by the well-respected theologian and historian Mark Noll. The rest of the book is simply amplification of that one statement. Whatever your interest in Christianity, the Bible, science and the Bible, or why some churches are so fixated on the “end times,” you will find the answers in this book. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
I Need Structure!
For the past three years I’ve been involved with an organization that promotes Bible study and faith around the world, Bible Study Fellowship International. The procedures that BSF follows were originally developed by its founder, A. Wetherell Johnson, who had been a missionary to China for many years. She was asked to start a Bible study for a group of women in California, and the organization spread from there.
Are You Optimistic or Hopeful? Which One Is Better?
If you follow me on my personal Facebook page (which doesn’t have much of anything personal about me, confusingly enough, since I started it in order to post political articles back during the election), you’ll know that I’m a YUGE fan of a conservative columnist over at National Review named Jonah Goldberg. (Music fans may know that one of Bach’s most famous compositions is a set of pieces called the “Goldberg Variations.” An early ancestor of the estimable Jonah? Maybe so.)
Anyway, this Goldberg has, like everyone else in the known universe and beyond who has anything to do with any kind of media, started a podcast, called The Remnant. The second episode, once you get past some rather sophomoric attempts at humor, has an interview with Yuval Levin, a name I’m sort of familiar with because Levin is a contributor to NR, whose website I check many imes a day. (If you’re a friend of mine through my aforementioned personal FB page you’ll know
Yet Another Book about Personality Types
Reading People: How Seeing the World through the Lens of Personality Changes Everything by Anne Bogel, available in several formats, published Sept. 2017. Link is to the Amazon page; I mistakenly said in an earlier post that I could not include direct Amazon links in my reviews. Anne also has a very popular website, Modern Mrs. Darcy, which deals with, well, how to be a modern Elizabeth Bennet.
So last week’s book pick was the new Gretchen Rubin opus on her Four Tendencies framework; I hope you’ve read it by now. It is really, really good. I promise. And this week’s book was brought to my attention by Gretchen’s interview with its author, Anne Bogel. I am very sorry that I didn’t get in on the pre-order bonus that would have allowed me to get the audiobook and the paperback versions together for the price of one. Since I had an Audible.com credit available I used that, but I wish I’d just bought the paperback or Kindle version.