Last week, Gary Haugen’s book The Locus Effect was released, and he did a half-hour interview with Gabe Lyons about the book. Haugen is the president of International Justice Mission, and his book explores why the end of poverty requires the end of everyday violence around the world. Interested in more? You can watch the video here. Read more
I thought this blog post by Ben Sherman was really interesting. In it, he talks about bad writing routines – and good ones, too: There is a place I used to go in California that always seemed to be full of writers – students, professors, novelists, writers of screenplays and children’s books and humanitarian reports. It was a popular spot and the coffee was good. Over a few months I myself drafted two whole books at that cafe (it must... Read more
There’s a lot of talk about vocation these days. The church is waking up to the need to equip parishioners not just on Sundays, but throughout the week. But how can church leaders do this? That’s an ongoing discussion over at The High Calling, and Amy Sherman offers some very practical ideas: It’s critical for church leaders to become what pastor Tom Nelson (author of Work Matters) calls “language police.” Although our orthodox theology may eschew the notion of a sacred/secular... Read more
The Superbowl is over, but sports keep going forever. And Zach Smith published an interesting piece over at QIdeas about “fair trade sports”: There has been tension in the relationship between sports and the Church for about as long as the Church can claim a formal existence. The early fathers of the Church were no lovers of the arena, and the suspicion of the body that was bred from Plato’s dichotomist thinking encouraged a negative view of the body as... Read more
I don’t watch a lot of documentaries, but there were quite a few good ones released in 2013. Over at Christianity Today, Asher Gelzer-Govatos made the surprising connection between those docs and St. Augustine: Plenty of good documentaries are made in this style: it dominates the genre. But 2013 yielded a number of documentaries which push the boundaries of the form. Films like The Act of Killing, Stories We Tell, 56 Up, and Room 237 are experimental documentaries whose particular take on how “true” stories are... Read more
The actor Philip Seymour Hoffman died this weekend of an apparent drug overdose – a tragedy, for anyone who saw any of his performances (I can’t list them all off, but some of his more spiritually-themed films included Magnolia and Doubt, and he most recently was in the second Hunger Games film as Plutarch Heavensbee). He may have been the finest actor of our time. Certainly one of the finest. In any case, I learned a lot from him, and I blogged... Read more
I remember that the copy of Winnie-the-Pooh I used to check out of the library when I was a child had maps in the front and back of the book, and I used to pore over them, intrigued by the placement of the Hundred Acre Wood among all the other locations. My brother was similarly fascinated by the maps in his Lord of the Rings books. Even today, I occasionally read a fantasy novel and find the maps to be some of the most... Read more
We’re all worried about being digitally overwhelmed. Over at Q Ideas, Claire Diaz-Ortiz (who helped found Twitter) was thinking about how Christians can beat that digital overwhelm epidemic: What can you do? How can you reap the best of technology’s blessings without suffering the worst of its curses? Is it even possible to find peace, rest, and that ever-elusive balance in a world of greater and greater expectations? The first, and by far the most important, step you can take... Read more
A lot of things can hold us back in our work – something they were exploring at The High Calling last week. But this one seemed especially interesting: “how your need for approval can hold you back in your work.” You’re 25. And when you’re applying for a promotion as a columnist in the metro newsroom, you give the editors what you think they want, rather than writing from that sweet spot that is uniquely you. You don’t get the job; it... Read more
On Monday, Ken Morefield reviewed the new film Gimme Shelter for Christianity Today. It’s a film with a strong pro-life message that also has good performances. He made a good point about this in his review: In his introduction to George MacDonald: An Anthology, C. S. Lewis wrote, “There are indeed, passages, many of them in this collection, where the wisdom and (I would dare call it) the holiness that are in him triumph over and even burn away the baser elements in his style.”... Read more
Mark D. Roberts
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