Anyone here read The Shack? Walter Henegar criticizing the book is akin to complaining about your aunt’s macaroni casserole, because everyone seems to love it no matter how bad it is for them. But The Shack may be worse than bad family cooking.

More significant, when Mack mentions biblical events or concepts (often in gross caricature), “God” promptly brushes them off and glibly explains how it really is. Unlike the biblical Jesus, who constantly quoted the Old Testament and spent many post-resurrection hours “opening their minds to understand the scriptures,” The Shack’s Papa [God the Father], Jesus, and Sarayu [Holy Spirit] turn Mack’s attention away from Scripture, coaxing him to trust instead their simplistic lessons set in idyllic, Thomas Kinkade-like scenes and delivered in the familiar therapeutic language of our age.

…

Good fiction has the potential to illuminate biblical truth, but not when it effectively supplants it. We need the Bible, not The Shack. The true Word takes more work to understand, and it won’t always tell us what we want to hear, but we can trust it to reveal a greater, wiser, more loving, and more gloriously Triune God than any novelist could conceive.

I heard tonight Haven Ministries’ radio show on this book. They have a comment blog about it, and announce at the top of the page that they intend not to endorse or bash the book, but to engage it. This they say while offering the book to all donors who request it. Isn’t that an endorsement? Haven links to John Stackhouse’s blog for weightier comments like this: “It seems to me important that authors of fiction defend art as needing no justification on some other grounds. From a Christian point of view, a well-rendered novel—or short story, or poem, or song lyric—needs only to be good in and of itself.”

Also: “The Shack skims briefly over the surface of theology of religions, raising the question particularly of whether God reveals himself to and saves people of other religions. . . . I am strongly inclined myself to a theological conviction that God’s salvation is extended beyond the range of those who have heard the Gospel, understood it, and accepted it as true.”

1. Add Mentos to a two-liter of Diet Coke manually.

2. Add Mentos to a two-liter of Diet Coke automatically.

3. Repeat step 2.

Result: The Domino Effect

One of these days I’ll get around to writing about books in this space again. My problem right now is that I’m reading a very long book which I find amazingly boring. So you have my review of that book to look forward to eventually (perhaps sometime in August). Until then, I blog on whatever catches my fancy. Or my plain.

I say “plain” because I was looking at a wall calendar I got from Half Price Books last winter. It’s a freebie, and worth that price. Instead of pretty pictures, it features monthly calendars on both the top and bottom panels (to save paper), along with tips on how to live in a more environmentally friendly manner. Continue reading Caveat elector →

Once upon a sunny morning a man who sat in a breakfast nook looked up from his scrambled eggs to see a circus elephant quietly wandering through the garden. The man went up to the bedroom where his wife was still asleep and woke her. “There’s an elephant in the garden,” he said. She opened one unfriendly eye and looked at him.

“Elephants don’t live in Kansas,” she said. Then, eyeing the clock, “But thank you for waking me up in time to watch The View.”

I had two thoughts during my weekend in Story City, Iowa. (Well, technically I had quite a few thoughts. I think pretty much all the time when I’m conscious. That’s just the kind of guy I am. But two of these thoughts were new.)

One has to do with family, and it probably won’t mean much to you, but I’ll share it anyway, because… because… because I have this forum in which to raise my barbaric yawp, I guess.

The history of Story City (at least the part that interests me) goes like this. In the 1840s, a few Norwegians began to take the gamble of traveling to this dangerous new country (where, their pastors at home liked to tell them, epidemics were rampant, wild Indians were likely to scalp them and slavers made a habit of kidnapping Norwegians to be sold in New Orleans. The part about the epidemics was true). The earliest successful settlements were centered around Lisbon, Illinois and Muskego, Wisconsin. Most of these immigrants came from what we call Western Norway (actually southwestern, but officially Norway has no south). It helped in dealing with all the strangeness and dangers to live among people from home, people whose dialects and customs you understood. Continue reading Story City Story II: The Sequel →

Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner Cable will be blocking access to child pornography through their Internet services. Verizon and Time-Warner are in the top five of worldwide Internet access providers. Sprint is one of the big three U.S. wireless providers. I’d like to see AT&T step up to the plate here. Comcast too.

Here’s a bit of awe given to thirty-one Huguenot women who would not reject their faith for 38 years. Karl Olsson writes:

To sit in a prison room with thirty others and to see the day change into night and summer into autumn, to feel the slow systemic changes within one’s flesh: the drying and wrinkling of the skin, the loss of muscle tone, the stiffening of the joints, the slow stupefaction of the senses—to feel all this and still to persevere seems almost idiotic to a generation which has no capacity to wait and to endure.

It was a good weekend. I’m sunburned, stiff, dehydrated and exhausted (I can tell my hemoglobin level still isn’t up to specs), but I had fun.

The drive down was an adventure. I had to get up at 4:30 a.m. to be in Story City, Iowa in time to set up, and it was a three-hour drive directly into a vicious south wind. But I made it on schedule. There were only three of us there, two guys and a woman, but our friend Sam from Missouri also came up with his Viking boat, which raised the tone of the encampment considerably: Continue reading Story City Story →

I didn’t see this article when we were talking several weeks ago about Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, but I think it’s important to link to it. The scientists at Reasons to Believe (RTB) say they haven’t seen the type of blacklisting described in the movie. Of course, they aren’t employed by these universities either. “RTB believes that God has miraculously intervened throughout the history of the universe in various ways millions, possibly even billions, of times to create each and every new species of life on Earth.”

In Reasons To Believe’s interaction with professional scientists, scientific institutions, universities, and publishers of scientific journals we have encountered no significant evidence of censorship, blackballing, or disrespect. As we have persisted in publicly presenting our testable creation model in the context of the scientific method, we have witnessed an increasing openness on the part of unbelieving scientists to offer their honest and respectful critique.

How about a little comment meme? Tell me the first thing that leaps to your mind when you read each of these things?

1. Excellent source of calcium
2. New and improved
3. 75% off
4. New York Times Bestseller
5. Get ‘Em While They’re Hot
6. Y2K Compatible

With the corrected spelling on this post, you may comment at will. No, please comment. I will add this post to my list of good reasons for flushing myself. I can hear the drain coming now.