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<\/a><\/p>\nRobert Crosby<\/strong><\/a> on the day Jesus shouted. Christopher Gehrz<\/strong><\/a> has an excellent blog on Pietism. Wander around a bit on his blog for some good learning. Must-read by Mark Roberts<\/strong><\/a> on what \u201csuccessful\u201d worship is.<\/p>\n Youcef Nadarkhani<\/strong><\/a>: \u201cThe Iranian Supreme Court has upheld the death sentence of a pastor convicted of apostasy and accused of evangelizing Muslims. Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani, 34, has been in prison since October 2009, and the appeal of his death sentence was rejected by the Iranian Supreme Court on June 28, 2011. He is to be executed by hanging. If the death sentence is carried out, it will be the first court-ordered execution of a Christian in Iran in 20 years.\u201d<\/p>\n Susan Orlean<\/strong><\/a>: \u201cThe fact is that the reason I like being on Twitter is precisely what this meme seems to scold about: hearing people air their little grievances and glories, because it\u2019s a chance to get a genuine sense of what their lives are all about. If not, why would you want to even bother with social media? If you really don\u2019t like it, just remember: there are people in the world who don\u2019t even have computers. #twitterproblems\u201d<\/p>\n What happens to our theology if life is found on other planets<\/strong><\/a>?<\/p>\n Capernaum synagogue to the left, but it\u2019s not the 1st Century one: the earlier version is under this one.<\/p>\n Prison Fellowship<\/strong><\/a>: \u201cRon Nikkel, PFI\u2019s president and CEO, said that this year\u2019s meeting is focused on life after prison. \u201cOne of the biggest issues is answering the question, \u2018What happens to a person when they come out of prison,\u2019\u201d Nikkel told The Christian Post. \u201cThey\u2019ve just come out of the most illogical of all society\u2019s institutions. You can\u2019t expect someone who has just hung out with a bunch of criminals at the university for crime to have a changed behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n I agree with Tullian<\/strong><\/a> in this: \u201cMany of us, in other words, think about spirituality exclusively in terms of personal piety, internal devotion, and spiritual formation. We focus almost entirely on ourselves and our private disciplines: praying, reading the Bible, and so on. That, we conclude, is<\/em> what spirituality is first and foremost\u2026The gospel causes us to look up to Christ and what he did, out to our neighbor and what they need, not in to ourselves and how we\u2019re doing. There\u2019s nothing about the gospel that fixes my eyes on me. Any version of Christianity that encourages you to think\u00a0mostly<\/em> about you is detrimental to your faith\u2013whether it\u2019s your failures or your successes; your good works or your bad works; your strengths or your weaknesses; your obedience or your disobedience.\u201d<\/p>\n John Piper on the NYC same-sex vote<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n Michael Hyatt<\/strong><\/a>: \u201ceveral years ago I went through a fairly significant examination of life, work, family, art and where it all was headed. I had just ended a pretty intense season in which I found myself spread thin and a little over-extended, and I knew that I couldn\u2019t sustain the pace indefinitely. Still, it was a critical juncture in my life and career. I was looking for some insight on how to stay engaged and keep moving forward.\u00a0 During that season, I was in a meeting in which a South African friend asked, \u201cDo you know what the most valuable land in the world is?\u201d The rest of us were thinking, \u201cWell, probably the diamond mines of Africa, or maybe the oil fields of the middle east?\u201d \u201cNo,\u201d our friend replied, \u201cit\u2019s the graveyard, because with all of those people are buried unfulfilled dreams, unwritten novels, masterpieces not created, businesses not started, relationships not reconciled. THAT is the most valuable land in the world.\u201d Then a little phrase popped into my head in such a way that it felt almost like a mandate. The phrase was \u201cdie empty.\u201d While it may sound intimidating, it was actually very freeing because I was suddenly aware that it\u2019s not my job to control the path of my career or what impact I may or may not have on the world. My only job\u2014each and every day\u2014is to empty myself, to do my daily work, and to try as much as possible to leave nothing unspoken, uncreated, unwritten. I made a commitment that if any given day were my last I wanted to die empty, having completely divested myself of whatever insight or work was in me to share on that day.\u201d<\/p>\n This kerfuffle <\/strong><\/a>was fun to follow\u2026<\/p>\n Meanderings in the News<\/p>\n 2. Say it ain\u2019t so! Fernanda Santos<\/strong><\/a> on the demise of librarians: \u201cBudget belt-tightening threatens to send school librarians the way of the card catalog. The schools superintendent in Lancaster, Pa., said he had to eliminate 15 of the district\u2019s 20 librarians to save full-day kindergarten classes. In the Salem-Keizer school district in Oregon, all 48 elementary and middle school librarians would lose their jobs under a budget proposal that faces a vote next week. In Illinois\u2019s School District 90, which spans several rural and suburban communities in the southern part of the state, parent volunteers have been running the libraries in the district\u2019s seven schools since September, in what the schools superintendent, Todd Koehl, described as \u201ca last-ditch effort\u201d to avoid closing their doors. And in New York City, half of the secondary schools appear to be in violation of a\u00a0state regulation<\/a> requiring them to have a librarian on staff, with the city currently employing 365 licensed librarians.\u201d<\/p>\n 3. John Gray does not like David Brooks\u2019 new book<\/strong><\/a>: \u201cFor what Brooks is attempting to sell the world is his brand of positive thinking, a vision of the power of the individual as an emotional being with the capacity to lead the \u201cgood life,\u201d all the while bettering himself and those around him by empowering his mind with the definitive knowledge of what it means to be \u201cmoral.\u201d Presented in the form of a life history of two fictional characters, Erica and Harold, it ends with Harold\u2019s death and a capsule version of Brooks\u2019s message. Harold reaches the end of his life on earth satisfied that he \u201chad achieved an important thing in his life. He had constructed a viewpoint. Other people see life primarily as a chess match played by reasoning machines. Harold saw life as a neverending interpenetration of souls.\u201d Despite its pretensions to realism, Brooks\u2019s account of Harold and Erica\u2019s journey is a morality tale of the most transparent\u2014and unconvincing\u2014kind.\u201d<\/p>\n 4. Speaking of reviews, Elizabeth Gumport<\/strong><\/a> doesn\u2019t like them. Here\u2019s a taste of her review of reviews: \u201cForced to smuggle thoughts of value into the small spaces between plot summary and biographical detail, reviewers accomplish next to nothing. Nobody tells them the truth, which is that compromises cannot be unmade and that every book read is another left unread. If more experienced authors admitted that reviews were pointless and boring\u2014as unread as they are unreadable\u2014who would review their books? Like hazing, reviewing is inflicted by the old and popular on the young and weak, who are told that before they can succeed at their chosen pursuit they must endure certain traditional trials.\u201d<\/p>\n 5. We see reports like this quite often these days, but what do they really tell us? (about the reporter)<\/p>\n 6. Where do we get our calories? Wow<\/strong><\/a>: \u201cA quarter of Americans\u2019 daily calories are now consumed as snacks and drinks between meals, according to researchers at last week\u2019s IFT expo in New Orleans. US consumers are snacking more than ever before as busy lifestyles lead to on-the-go eating and drinking, blurring the boundaries between meals and snacking. \u201cBetween 1977 and 2006, snacking in the American diet has grown to constitute \u2018a full eating event,\u2019 or a fourth meal, averaging about 580 calories each day,\u201d <\/em>said professor of foods and nutrition at Purdue University Richard Mattes. Half of those snack calories were consumed as beverages between meals, he said.\u201d<\/p>\n 7. For those who need some amygdala stimulation<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n 9. Hip babushkas<\/strong><\/a>: \u201cIn Russian culture, one iconic image is the elderly woman \u2014 in Russian, you call her a \u201cbabushka\u201d \u2014 sitting on a roadside, selling vegetables from her garden. One group of babushkas from the village of Buranovo, 600 miles east of Moscow, is blowing up that stereotype. The dozen or so women \u2013 mostly in their 70s and 80s \u2013 have become a musical sensation, charming audiences across Russia. They sing Beatles tunes and songs by iconic Russian rocker Viktor Tsoi. They fly around the country for concerts. They made it to the Russian finals of the Eurovision music contest. And they have a Facebook page. These women are sending a message loud and clear: It can be hip to be a babushka.\u201d<\/p>\n 10. George Weigel\u2019s<\/strong><\/a> salty comments on NY voting for same-sex marriage: \u201cWhat the gay lobby proposes in the matter of marriage is precisely the opposite of this. Marriage, as both religious and secular thinkers have acknowledged for millennia, is a social institution that is older than the state and that precedes the state. The task of a just state is to recognize and support this older, prior social institution; it is not to attempt its redefinition. To do the latter involves indulging the totalitarian temptation that lurks within all modern states: the temptation to remanufacture reality. The American civil-rights movement was a call to recognize moral reality; the call for gay marriage is a call to reinvent reality to fit an agenda of personal willfulness. The gay-marriage movement is thus not the heir of the civil-rights movement; it is the heir of Bull Connor and others who tried to impose their false idea of moral reality on others by coercive state power.\u201d<\/p>\n Meanderings in Sports<\/p>\n<\/a>Patheos has some stuff to be read. Tim Dalrymple is doing a series on homosexuality: part one<\/strong><\/a>, part two<\/strong><\/a>, part three<\/strong><\/a>. Tim also explores the \u201cgo the f*** to sleep\u201d book<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/a>1. On hanging on to food labels, by Linda Mihalik<\/strong><\/a>: \u201cIn January, food industry giants\u00a0launched a new food label<\/a> for the front of packaged foods\u2014Nutrition Keys (above)\u2014which was widely seen as an attempt to influence or divert the U.S. Food and Drug Administration\u2019s ongoing efforts to create better labeling. That\u2019s a problem. In an opinion\u00a0piece<\/a> published this week in the\u00a0New England Journal of Medicine,<\/em> Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University, says that the Grocery Manufacturers Association and the Food Marketing Institute\u2019s label is a \u201cunilateral, unscientific, preemptive approach taken by the food companies.\u201d Brownell was even more blunt when I called him: \u201cThe industry has been given a chance to police itself and they\u2019ve failed.\u201d In other words, it can\u2019t be trusted.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>8. iPad magic<\/strong><\/a>: \u201cThe magical nature of the iPad lies in the intuitive grasp of its operation by almost anyone who touches it. It\u2019s in the way that it does simple things very quickly. The way that, using the full screen, it transforms itself into hundreds of different tools at the tap of a finger.\u201d<\/p>\n