The Weekly Town Crier
Hello and welcome to your and welcome back and welcome again. This is the Weekly Town Crier, where, once a week, i pass along a collection of links that, for one reason or another, caused me to think. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I wholeheartedly agree with or endorse what’s on the other end of every link, just that they made me think, and I hope they’ll do the same for you.
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Browse the week in photos from Yahoo.
Read as John Piper considers “Abraham Lincoln’s Path to Divine Providence.”
Read as Time wonders if its time to pay teachers based on their performance.
Visit Tim Keller’s webiste for his new book The Reason For God featuring video and audio.
Read as N.T. Wright says most Christians are wrong about heaven.
Read about the woman who is suing Best Buy for $54 million over a lost laptop.
Proving that “research” is not always “objective,” read Barna’s new report that says that: “Americans Embrace Various Alternatives to a Conventional Church Experience as Being Fully Biblical.”
Read about the U.K. declaring 2008 “The Year of Reading.”
Read as the Evangelical Alliance considers Sharia Law in British Society.
Consider Desiring God’s $1 Easter Outreach.
Read as Al Mohler considers the rise in teen suicides as connected to the rise in websites giving detailed instruction on how to kill one’s self.
Read this piece which says that “Jehovah’s Witnesses are the fastest-growing church body in the U.S. and Canada.”
Read as U.S. News and World Report examines Huckabee and his relationship to evangelicals.
Read about the debate over illegal immigration stirring within the LDS church.
Read about the Pope’s plans to visit the White House.
Read as the St. Petersburg Times says that “Faith Trumps Science” by noting that “Florida parents don’t have much faith in evolution.”
Read about the recent testimony on same-sex “marriage” in Maryland.
Read about “American bishop, Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh” saying that “Anglicanism, it seems, is coming apart.”
Read as John Mark Reynolds suggests five reasons why Mike Huckabee should get out of the race now.
Read about Kimbo Slice’s KO of Tank Abbott.
Read about Congress again considering “a bill to protect religious expression in the workplace.”
Read as Brian McLaren says that the, “Christian faith is understood as a story by a postmodern generation that sees itself as part of the developing storyline.”
Read as “Apologists ask churches to step up response to ‘militant atheism.’”
Watch as 200 people freeze in the middle of Grand Central Station.
Read this profile of Jay Farrar of Son Volt.
Read as Mark Dever argues that “The way many Christians practice seeking God’s will before they make a decision amounts to spiritual and emotional bondage.”
See the amazing “bookshelf staircase” (ht: lhb).
Read about the Muslim leader who recently told an audience that “American culture’s view of American Muslims and Islam is steadily deteriorating under an onslaught of “bigotry” on cable news shows, newspaper op-ed pages and in the blogosphere.”
Read this piece which claims that “Christianity and Islam are competing for believers by promising Nigerians prosperity in this world as well as salvation in the next.”
Read as “Defense lawyers and prosecutors agreed Wednesday that California’s death penalty system was deeply troubled but split over the causes and solutions.”
Read about the “women’s commentary” on the Koran.
Read as Democrats are relying more heavily on evangelical voters.
Read as the Pope says that a trip to China is “unthinkable” at this time.
Read about what happened to all of the shirts and hats that were printed in advance declaring the New England Patriots as the Super Bowl Champions.
Read about the frequency that only teens can hear that is being used against them in Britain.
Read as the AZ Republic wonders whether fasting is beneficial.
Read as Douglas Groothius considers what is necessary for a genuine “Christian counter-culture” to exist (ht: JT).
See the delegate count in the presidential primary elections.
Read about Oxford conducting a “scientific study” on religious belief.
Read about the traveling papal art show.
Read about Qatar’s first Christian church.
Could you elaborate on what you meant here?
Sure, there’s a not-so-subtle thread running through Barna’s books and research that “traditional” church is no longer viable and that we need to adopt a house church model. I sometimes get the feeling that much of his “research” is simply him trying to make his case.
Thank you for the link to the Economist article about the use and misuse of sound. I’ll show it to my wife (an audiologist). The next time I need to disperse a crowd of ruffians, I now know that Barry Manilow works well (according to Australian law enforcement). This reminds me of the Martian-defeating use of Slim Whitman recordings in “Mars Attacks”.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean that Barna’s research isn’t objective, does it?
I mean, I don’t if I agree with him or not (I can’t really speak to that, not having read anything he’s written), but I’m sure, if he isn’t being objective in his research, there’s some evidence to back that up.
Then again, it could pretty easily be argued that his opinion about the est. church’s failure is a result of his research.
Again, I’m not arguing either way, just looking for some evidence to support a critical view.