Aug
11
2010
Worth a Look 8.11.10
Ross Douthat’s tepid defense of marriage:
We don’t keep ideals around for fun, or because everyone agrees with them. We argue for them because they’re true - regardless of whether they’ve been instantiated in most places and times. The more transcendental your ideals, we might say, the more practical our politics. If the ideal is true, then we ought to get to the business of figuring out how to take incremental steps toward it.
The death of the phone call. (This explains why I’d rather receive a text message than a voice mail.):
This generation doesn’t make phone calls, because everyone is in constant, lightweight contact in so many other ways: texting, chatting, and social-network messaging. And we don’t just have more options than we used to. We have better ones: These new forms of communication have exposed the fact that the voice call is badly designed. It deserves to die. (HT - Z)
Tony Reinke on writing backwards:
One way to add creativity to your writing (or preaching) is by writing backwards. Not like I have done in the title of this post, but by writing backwards in the linear development of your thoughts.
We naturally develop thoughts from left to right and from top to bottom so it requires a little practice to train you brain to write from the bottom up, from the close to the start, from the main point to the supporting arguments, from the punch-line to the background. But it’s worth a try.
Mark D. Roberts on becoming a peacemaker:
Once again I want to address a very practical question, the kind of query I get from people who want to take God’s truth and live it out in their daily lives. So here’s a question that I can imagine being asked by such a person: “Mark, there are so many ways to be involved in God’s peacemaking work that I feel overwhelmed. I don’t even know where to start. I care about so many different issues. What should I do to begin living as a peacemaker?”