The Gospel of Steve Jobs

Last updated on: January 20, 2011 at 2:22 pm By Scot McKnight

From Andy Crouch’s insightful piece about Steve Jobs: As remarkable as Steve Jobs is in countless ways—as a designer, an innovator, a (ruthless and demanding) leader—his most singular quality has been his ability to articulate a perfectly secular form of hope. Nothing exemplifies that ability more than Apple’s early logo, which slapped a rainbow on the very archetype of human fallenness and failure—the bitten fruit—and made it a sign of promise and progress…… Steve Jobs was the evangelist of this... Read more

One.Life — A Reflection

Last updated on: January 19, 2011 at 4:48 pm By Scot McKnight

This has been a wonderful two weeks for One.Life: Jesus Calls, We Follow. The book appeared almost mid December, and it’s now starting to kick in with some readers, and I want to offer a reflective piece about what’s happening. Pastors are reading it, benefiting from it and “using” it in their ministries. Just today I got a note from a pastor who will be using it in some small groups but said he’s passing it out like candy. Another... Read more

Polkinghorne on Natural Theology and Moral Law (RJS)

Last updated on: January 20, 2011 at 9:57 am By RJS

In this post today I would like to point to a series of posts on the BioLogos site featuring Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne and his views on Natural Theology. Dr. Polkinghorne (picture below obtained from wikipedia) was a very successful scientist, Professor of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge University, before he resigned to study for the priesthood. He has since been a parish priest, Dean of the Chapel at Trinity Hall Cambridge and President of Queen’s College, Cambridge. After retirement he... Read more

Should Teachers Befriend Students? 2 (Sam Lamerson)

Last updated on: January 19, 2011 at 1:20 pm By Scot McKnight

Technology in the Classroom A friend of mine is a middle-school teacher. She told me the other day of having some photographic slides around the room and one of her young students picked one up, held it gingerly up to the light like a loaded gun, and was amazed. “Miss Neal, Miss Neal, you are never going to believe this. These cardboard things, they are like pictures only really small. If you hold them up to the light you can... Read more

Schwarzenegger’s Costs

Last updated on: January 18, 2011 at 8:51 am By Scot McKnight

The first one is replaceable; the second one isn’t. From Reuters: (Reuters) – Serving as California governor cost Arnold Schwarzenegger at least $200 million, the bodybuilding star turned actor and politician told a newspaper in his native Austria, insisting ‘it was more than worth it.” Counting expenses and lost income from acting in Hollywood films, “in all it is probably more than $200 million,” he told Krone when asked how much his two terms in Sacramento had cost. “But I’m... Read more

Tiger Mother Meets Mr. Moderation

Last updated on: January 18, 2011 at 8:59 pm By Scot McKnight

David Brooks, who seems to think social education is far more demanding… Chua would do better to see the classroom as a cognitive break from the truly arduous tests of childhood. Where do they learn how to manage people? Where do they learn to construct and manipulate metaphors? Where do they learn to perceive details of a scene the way a hunter reads a landscape? Where do they learn how to detect their own shortcomings? Where do they learn how... Read more

Tiger Mother Meets Ayelet Waldman

Last updated on: January 17, 2011 at 2:13 pm By Scot McKnight

From WSJ: Here are some of the things that my four children of a Jewish mother were always allowed to do: • Quit the piano and the violin, especially if their defeatist attitude coincided with a recital, thus saving me from the torture of listening to other people’s precious children soldier through hackneyed pieces of the juvenile repertoire, plink after ever more unbearable plonk. • Sleep over at their friends’ houses, especially on New Year’s Eve or our anniversary, thus... Read more

Ross Douthat on Sarah Palin

Last updated on: January 17, 2011 at 7:10 am By Scot McKnight

From NYTimes: To the media: Cover Sarah Palin if you want, but stop acting as if she’s the most important conservative politician in America. Stop pretending that she has a plausible path to the presidency in 2012. (She doesn’t.) Stop suggesting that she’s the front-runner for the Republican nomination. (She isn’t.) And every time you’re tempted to parse her tweets for some secret code or crucial dog whistle, stop and think, this woman has fewer Twitter followers than Ben Stiller, and... Read more

Tentmaking 7 (Jeff Cook)

Last updated on: January 19, 2011 at 7:14 am By Scot McKnight

The Tension between Leading and Teaching: Tentmaking 7 (the Final Post) I know of a few pastors who have solid, large churches who have stepped out of the “executive pastor” role, and have exclusively assumed a “teaching pastor role,” allowing someone else to do the fulltime work of leading their church community. This seems quite healthy, especially since teaching and leading are too very different gifts—and very few have both in abundance. Unfortunately, most tentmakers (and many pastors generally) are... Read more

How They Changed Their Mind about Women 2

Last updated on: January 19, 2011 at 7:05 am By Scot McKnight

Alan Johnson, well-known and much-loved professor at Wheaton, has edited a collection of stories of well-known evangelicals who have in their own ways changed when it comes to women in ministry. His book has a great title: How I Changed My Mind about Women in Leadership: Compelling Stories from Prominent Evangelicals. In his own introduction, Johnson maps some common themes that he has found in the stories evangelical leaders tell in how they changed their mind. Are these themes the... Read more

Who found Moses' basket in the Nile?