Are you sure you really wouldn't rather have a Mac? This is killing me. (Hat tip - Evangelical Outpost)
As I've mentioned before I'm not only a fan of Lost, but also of Alias . . .
If you are too, here's a blog that has a couple of categories devoted to Alias.
Since I almost never agree with Matthew Yglesias about anything . . .
I don't want to pass up an opportunity to agree and find a little common ground, even if it's about snow on the ground. In this post he complains about the wimpiness of Washingtonians when it comes to snow. He used to live in Boston, where they get real snow and it's no big deal. It's a big deal in Washington D.C., and living up closer to Baltimore I have to agree it's a big deal here. What he says here about Washington D.C. could easily be said about things here in Baltimore:
As a result snowstorms that would be shrugged off in New England (or, I assume, the Upper Midwest) become city-wide catastrophes with unplowed roads and unshoveled walks proliferating. District drivers, meanwhile, are uniquely inept at handling adverse weather conditions and traffic that becomes unbelievably snarled at the slightest hint of rain grinds to an absolute standstill when faced with a single inch of snow.
Of course, with me being a Florida boy and all, the little snow we get here is just about right - enough that I think it's cool, but not so much that I long to move back to Florida. But even the natives here agree that this area doesn't know what to do when it snows.
On a more serious note, Matthew Yglesias is one of the more popular poli-bloggers on the left, so those of you who are up and coming right-leaning poli-bloggers need to read him. You'll rarely agree with him, but he's a good writer and has some influence.
And getting back to the subject of apologetics . . .
Ryan Wentzel has a friend at Westminster Seminary in California who is writing a paper for Michael Scott Horton titled "Circling on God" wherein he will seek to defend Van Til's concept of the place of circularity in apologetics. Ryan will be serializing the paper in several more posts.
And, when you are talking about apologetics, in my mind the king of apologetics in the blogosphere is Jeremy Pierce at Parableman.
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I love it when someone says the same thing I have said but says it better . . .
One of my first posts was Dealing with Depression About the Church, where I talked about the necessity and importance of the church in a believer's life. I also did a post called Relational Apologetics where I mentioned that the Christian community is the best apologetic. While looking at the LORB Aggregator tonight I came across Tod Bolsinger's post Birthing Christians where he hits the same themes only far more eloquently than I did. Here's a quote to whet your appetite:
This is just a spiritual fact: there is no true believing without belonging. True believers belong to Christ and to other believers. They are “engrafted” into his body as “members of one another.” (Romans 12:15).
But that true believing often starts, appropriately I might add, by “hanging out” with Christ and the believers. By “belonging” first. Christian personhood, like human personhood always comes to us through other believers.
You can get more on this subject from Tod's book It Takes a Church to Raise a Christian - which has just now moved to the top of my "must acquire" list.
There goes Adrian one-upping me again . . .
Awhile back I started giving out a "Jolly" award to my favorite post of the week, but I've fallen off the wagon with it lately as time has gotten away from me. I don't know if he borrowed the idea from me or not but he is now awarding a "Warnie" to blogs and blog posts that he feels are worthy of a special honor. The first "Warnie" award winner goes to Dr. John Mark Reynolds. I can see I'm going to have to dust off the old "Jolly" awards.
Faith mean's never having to say your sorry . . .
"Apologetics" is a funny word to the uninitiated. In the common vernacular it means to admit you are wrong and say "I'm sorry." But to the Christian, apologetics is the discipline of defending the faith. Lately I'm seeing a flurry of blog activity on the subject of apologetics. Razorskiss and Every Thought Captive are now hosting Vox Apologia, which is a carnival kind of forum, but all entries are given in response to a particular question. They also have started an apologetics aggregator which shows great promise.
While I'm talking apologetics I would be remiss if I didn't call attention to one of the top apologists amongst the God-bloggers - Jeff Clinton at The Dawn Treader. Jeff came on strong last year when he started this blog on blogspot. He took a short time off last year, then switched to Typepad and came on strong. I just checked him out again tonight and he is still going strong. He's been hob-nobbing with some of the big dogs in the evangelical community and taking on Carl Sagan and his followers in his spare time.
Roses are red, violets are blue . . .
OK, I admit it I don't get poetry. Remember the scene in Spiderman II where Doc Oc told Peter Parker that chicks dig poetry (ok - he didn't use those words exactly, but that's what he meant). Peter kind of gave him this glassy eyed stare - that's how I feel when I try to read poetry. The closest I ever came to poetry was in high school, trying to help my best friend come up with some poetry for his girlfriend. He had bought her some flowers and wanted to say something smooth so I encouraged him to say something poetic to her. He couldn't think of anything to say, so I decided to help him. I said "OK, finish this - 'roses are red, violets are blue . . . ' He thought for a minute and said (I promise I am not making this up) "this is your face, so stick it there." Needless to say, his relationship with this particular girl didn't last.
What got me thinking about this was a post from Sherry at Semicolon who said she has a student in a class who just doesn't get poetry. I get the feeling that Sherry does understand poetry but she is struggling with how to help neanderthals like her student and me get poetry. One of the problems you run into is that when you try to explain poetry with prose you lose a good deal of the meaning. She is asking for suggestions, so if you have any give her a comment and send me a comment too.
This wouldn't bother me except for the fact that the Bible itself has a huge amount of poetry in it and I wonder what I am missing by not being able to understand poetry. Also, in listening to George Grant recently he said that one of the problems of our day is our lack of appreciation for poetry. So please people help me out here - how can I get poetry?
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