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Weekend A La Carte (10/27)

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Hobbits, Hot Chocolate, Etc – Redeemed Reader: “Two weeks from today on Monday, November 5th, our Great Hobbit Read Along Adventure begins! We’ll cover two or three chapters of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien each week for five weeks, ending the first week of December, just before the release of the movie version by Peter Jackson. We hope it will be an exciting adventure for individuals, families and youth groups who choose to join us, with insights from a number of Christian authors and cultural commentators to help you get more from your reading.”

Above the Clouds – The beauty of God’s creation doesn’t stop at the clouds. Here’s a small collection of photographs from above the clouds.

The Moon Illusion – And while we’re above the clouds, here’s an interesting little video. Ever noticed that sometimes the moon appears to be big and sometimes it appears to be small? This video explains that this is actually an optical illusion and how to verify it.

The Reason We Are Sent – Mike Glenn reflects on a great quote from Bonhoeffer: “A pastor should not complain about his congregation, certainly never to other people, but also not to God. A congregation has not been entrusted to him in order that he should become its accuser before God and men.”

Viking Fighting – It turns out that everything you learned from the movies about sword fighting has been dead wrong. I guess that should be no surprise. These guys show how it really would have been done and why only an idiot (and a dead one, at that) would do it any other way.

Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose…only (upon) the Beloved who will never pass away.

—C.S. Lewis

  • Throw Out the Buoys

    Throw Out the Buoys!

    When I was young, my family owned a cottage on a lake. From a young age, I loved to head out in our little motorboat so I could explore that lake and the others that were connected to it. I could easily make a day out of slipping into little inlets to see where they…

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    A La Carte (January 29)

    A La Carte: Your phone habits / A guide for single women / JFK, conspiracy theories, and the Deep State / So what if you’re bored? / God’s a writer / Hard relationships / Kindle deals / and more.

  • 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…