These are posts relating to things I have read on other blogs or websites.

Anne Rice and being Christian

I claim to be a Christian. What does that label really mean?Does it imply something about my politics? Does it tell you what sort of a car I drive? Is it a label sewn into my clothes, like the once-celebrated label of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union from this 1981 ad campaign? ... Continue reading

50 things…

Joe Carter of First Things follows up last week's list Fifty Things a Man Should Be Able To Do with this week's counter: Fifty Things a Man Should Never Do. Both the lists and the comments are worth reading.What do you think? ... Continue reading

O Holy Night

There's a lot of great Advent blogging going on. Roger Overton, who writes for The A-Team Blog, is doing a line-by-line devotional series on the great Christmas hymn O Holy Night.From Roger's introduction: The original “O Holy Night” was composed in French in 1847 by Adolphe Adam. He used the ... Continue reading

Blue whale crooners

Like Italian crooners and Latin lovers, male blue whales serenade potential mates with song. Scientists have been recording these songs since the early 1960s, first in the Atlantic, then branching out to listening stations around the globe. A few years ago they reached a startling conclusion: year ... Continue reading

It is well with my soul

Justin Taylor at Between Two Worlds writes: [Tomorrow] in history, 1873, the steamship Ville du Havre was struck by an iron sailing vessel while crossing the Atlantic. 246 people died, including the four daughters of Chicago lawyer Horatio Spafford. His wife Anna survived. Just two years earlier ... Continue reading

Confessing our national guilt

May 26 is National Sorry Day in Australia, a national attempt to heal the wounds of the century-long practice of forcibly removing mixed-race children from their Aboriginal mothers. This government policy, which was carried out for about 100 years from 1860 to modern times, is known to have ... Continue reading

Deconstructing Bart Ehrman

Back before cable and the internet, we used to depend on Uncle Walter for news. A consummate professional, CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite could always be relied on to get his facts straight and the questions of the day answered with precision.Today, the inescapable 24/7 news cycle and the ... Continue reading

Catez on Slumdog Millionaire

Since I haven't managed to see this movie yet, I was interested in Catez Steven's impressions on Slumdog Millionaire. She has some good comments about the movie's moral threads. "It's a movie that works on a lot of different levels, and it reminded me of a Rushdie novel in the way the elements are ... Continue reading