If you do much reading of books on business or leadership, you’ll soon be encouraged to fail. Popular books and the gurus who write them are always touting failure: “We should be free to fail.” “We should celebrate failure.” “Success only comes through much failure.” Etc. etc. etc. Still, much of our world hasn’t learned this less. Not our business. Not our schools. Not even ourselves, if you’re anything like me. My inclination towards perfectionism, one might almost say my... Read more
What About Your Secret Life? Romans 2:5-29 And this is the message I proclaim—that the day is coming when God, through Christ Jesus, will judge everyone’s secret life. Romans 2:16 If chapter 2 were all we had of Romans, we’d think that we had to spend our whole life trying to earn God’s salvation. Even more discouraging would be the knowledge that, in the end, we wouldn’t be able to do it. Romans 2 is part of a larger conversation,... Read more
As a blogger, I am asked to review dozens of books each month. As someone with a full-time job and a full-time life, I rarely accept these requests. But when I was asked to review iFaith: Connecting with God in the 21st Century by Daniel Darling, I considered saying “Yes.” I am quite interested in the relationship between faith and technology. A book called iFaith seems to lie in the middle of my curiosity. A quick review of Darling’s website... Read more
Part 25 of series: How Does God Guide Us? Yesterday, I began to respond to the question: What if the Lord does not speak? This question, posed by one of my blog readers in response to my series How Does God Guide Us? assumes that there are times in our relationship with God when he does not speak to us? Is this assumption correct? Or are times of apparent silence really a matter of our failure to listen attentively to... Read more
The New York Times, like most news sources, is filled with what could only be described as bad news. Whether the paper is reporting on the U.S. economy or the Middle East, there isn’t much to gladden soul. Until now. According to Gretchen Reynolds, chocolate can help you be more physically fit. “How Chocolate Can Help Your Workout” explains a scientific study from the University of California, San Diego. In this study, mice were given “a purified form of cacao’s... Read more
New York Times reporter Nick Bilton was faced with a problem. As he prepared to move from New York to San Francisco, he had to decide whether or not to move his library of print books with him. After deciding which of his possession to take with him and which to leave behind, he was in a quandary: But there was one thing (actually, many of one thing) that I couldn’t decide what to do about — my print books.... Read more
Part 24 of series: How Does God Guide Us? In response to my recent series “How Does God Guide Us?” I received a thoughtful email from a man I’ll call EH. He asks the question: What if the Lord does not speak? EH explains his question by noting “the famous gap between Malachi and John the Baptist for the nation of Israel,” a time when God did not speak prophetically as he had in the days of Isaiah and Jeremiah.... Read more
I was surprised by a recent article in the Times. In “For New Yorker on iPad, Words are the Thing,” Jeremy Peters reported on the growing number of New Yorker readers who read the magazine on their iPads. Recently, the New Yorker said that it had 100,000 iPad readers. Given the literary nature of the magazine, this surprises me. I would have expected New Yorker readers to be hold outs against the onslaught of e-readers. I was also surprised –... Read more
Virginia Heffernan, New York Times writer on digital and pop culture, offers up commentary on what makes web videos successful and why they fail miserably. “When Shilling on the Web, Think Small” was inspired by two recent efforts that bombed, one by Mariah Carey and one by Barack Obama. Heffernan begins: Mariah Carey and Barack Obama each had something to sell this week, and they made live videos to do it. Both videos bombed. Ms. Carey’s pitch on HSN, for... Read more
Mark D. Roberts
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Muslims in America: Some Fascinating Data
A headline in yesterday’s New York Times reads: “Muslims are Loyal to U.S. and Hopeful, Poll Finds.” In this article, Laurie Goodstein reports on the results of a recent Gallup survey of 2,482 Americans, including 475 Muslims. You can find the whole Gallup report here. Some of the results of the survey are predictably discouraging. For example, 48% of Muslims reported that they had experienced racial or religious discrimination in the previous year. This is more than any other religious... Read more