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A La Carte (March 22)

A La Carte Collection cover image

Amazon is having a “Big Spring Sale.” There are tons of products on sale, of course, but my interest is always primarily in books. You’ll find Kindle devices with a moderate discount. And, as you filter for books, you can find a few interesting picks. As for Kindle deals, today you’ll find a key volume in Nick Needham’s outstanding church history series.

Meanwhile, Westminster Books has a sale on a new book by Melissa Kruger called Parenting with Hope.

Being Human on World Down Syndrome Day

This was a fitting reflection for yesterday’s World Down Syndrome Day. “I am concerned that amidst this standard discourse about Down Syndrome, so heavily determined by abortion-related policy, that other more generative lines of inquiry are often precluded. For example, we might ask, if people with Down Syndrome are just as human as you and I, how should we contemplate the mystery of what it means to be a human being?” (See also this video by the child of someone whose blog I often link to.)

Performative Offense

Samuel James considers Coldplay and Taylor Swift and their examples of performative offense. “We live in an era where the combination of authenticity and vice means that we are seeing some examples of performative offense. Performative offense is what happens when people indulge in vice less out of a sincere desire to indulge it, and more out of a desire to sell their image in the public square.”

The Introvert

“We live in a noisy world, do we not? Deafening, in fact. A chaotic culture with throngs of people highly uncomfortable with silence. It is considered prestigious to fill up one’s time indiscriminately, often to the neglect of one’s soul.”

The Church of England and Cost-Free Righteousness

Carl Trueman looks at a recent report from the Church of England and tells how it indicates their desire for a cost-free righteousness. “The irony of the report, of course, is that it criticizes Western imperialism, of which it sees missionaries as tools, and yet does so on the basis of the latest Western imperialist ideology: cultural relativism and the notion that claims to truth are really instrumental to power.”

Preachers, Aspire to Be Relentlessly Interesting

Trevin Wax encourages preachers to be relentlessly interesting (even if this means they need to preach a little shorter). “There’s no reason for solid, biblical preaching to bore people. Crafting a sermon well, with intention, and being passionate in your delivery so your tone reflects the seriousness of the substance, isn’t something new. This has been and remains a perennial concern of Christian exegetes.”

On Nostalgia

We can often look to the past as the good old days and conveniently set aside what was terrible back then. “But something is profoundly wrong with today. This is perhaps only ‘different wrong’ to the past but that doesn’t make it less wrong. The past was better in those respects that critics of modernity criticise even if not in lots of others. It’s not sepia-tinted to suggest so, and we should be able to do so in every age until the kingdom is fully unveiled. Which is to say let’s be wary of nostalgia, but let’s be wary of lazy critiques of it too.”

Flashback: On Being the Main Character in Your Own Sermon

I pray that Christ would be so present and so visible that people would fail to think of me at all.

Good advice may help us in daily direction; the Good News concerning Jesus Christ saves us from sin’s guilt and tyranny over our lives and the fear of death. It’s Good News because it does not depend on us.

—Michael Horton

  • Happy Lies

    Happy Lies

    I’m quite certain you have heard of the New Age movement. Though its popularity seems to have crested and begun to wane some time ago, it continues to wield a good bit of influence. But I wonder if you’ve heard of another similarly-named but quite different movement called New Thought.

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    A La Carte (January 28)

    A La Carte: Parenting is hard / The wildness of orthodoxy / Rubbing shoulders throughout eternity / Glorifying ourselves / The middle of somewhere / Is Roman Catholic baptism valid? / Excellent Kindle deals / and more.

  • Who Am I?

    It is not simply that we as a culture have lost our knowledge of God, but that in so doing we have also lost sight of ourselves. “Who am I?” is the question of the age.

  • Church cemetery

    If I Could Change Anything about the Modern Church

    I have often been asked what I consider the greatest weakness of today’s church or what I would change about today’s church if I could. Such questions make for good discussion at a conference Q&A session but they are also pretty much impossible to answer in a compelling way. It’s not like any of us…

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    A La Carte (January 27)

    A La Carte: To men delaying marriage / A mother unknown / Steve Lawson update / Three essential values for effective teamwork / God is good even when he doesn’t do what we want / Kindle deals.

  • Closet

    How To Learn To Pray

    Christians are well-resourced with tremendous books that teach the theology and the practice of prayer. Many churches and ministries offer powerful classes that teach why we must pray and how we must pray. We are truly blessed.