Connection Point, June 2010 Edition from CBMC on Vimeo.

I edited this video last week, and we’ve talked about it around the office since, so I am spontaneously sharing it with you. This is part of my day job as a graphic designer for Christian Business Men’s Connection. The story is remarkable, and you will see only a few of the details. Two guys who met as teenagers in a Kung Fu school became great friends through God’s saving grace.

I finally watched “Gladiator” the other day. This news may surprise you. A guy who loves swords as much as I do, you would think, would have leaped for “Gladiator” like a trout after a fly, the moment it was released.

But in fact I found myself putting it off. I’m pretty sure I know why I delayed, too. I’d read a review that told me what happens to Maximus’ wife and son. I knew that in order to enjoy the good parts, I’d have to go through that scene, and whether it happened off screen or on, it would poison the whole thing for me. I hope you won’t think less of me if I admit that I’m basically a pretty tenderhearted guy, with a low tolerance for the suffering of innocents.

As a writer, I understand why they added that scene (and, according to Wikipedia, it was added. It wasn’t in the original script. They put it in to increase Maximus’ incentive for vengeance). You have to raise the stakes, if you want to engage an audience and motivate a character to dire and terrible deeds. People don’t wake up one morning and say, “I think I’ll assassinate a dictator today.” They need (or so we imagine) a personal reason, a mighty, visceral wrong to right. Continue reading We saw this coming, didn't we? →

I decided that gunny sacks would be just the things to tote some of my Viking gear around in. So I dropped in at my local hardware store tonight. A young female employee asked me if I needed help. I asked if they had any gunny sacks.

She said, “Any what?”

She had never heard of a gunny sack in her life.

What strange world is this I find myself in, where there are people who don’t know what a gunny sack is?

Then I was thinking about how we speak about time. In Norwegian, if it’s, say, 9:55, or five minutes before 10:00, you call it “fem på ti.” Which literally means, “five on ten.”

And I remembered something I used to hear people say when I was a kid. My parents and folks around my home town would have called that time, “five of ten.”

So I’m wondering, do people say that anywhere else in the country, or is it an Americanized version of the Norwegian idiom, exclusive to areas where Scandinavians settled in large numbers?



Penn Jillette, the magician and showman, had sort of grudging praise for religious Americans in an appearance on Lopez Tonight on the TBS television network.

…I’ve got to say it was actually a shock doing the show, the religious communities in the United States of America are the most tolerant people worldwide. I mean, we did really aggressive stuff we believe strongly, and mostly got letters from Christians and Catholics saying we really like how passionately and clearly you put out your ideas. Very few nut cases.

I don’t follow Jillette’s work closely, and I’ll confess he’s offended me occasionally when I’ve tried. But I have the impression that he’s a man of rare integrity in our day, someone who refuses to tell lies just because they’ll support his views. He has my respect.

Over at The American Spectator, Mark Tooley examines the continued pattern of condescension and patronization demonstrated by mainline Protestant denominations, in their dealings with their more conservative (and soon to be more numerous) African counterparts.

Liberal church activists are reluctant to acknowledge that African Christianity has a firm mind of its own, preferring condescendingly to portray it as primitive and easily manipulated by conservative U.S. religionists. It is true that much of African Christianity is new, somewhat similar to fast growing, early American frontier revivalism in its earnest faith, populism, and strong sense of the supernatural. According to the World Christian Encyclopedia of 2001, Africa was less than 10 percent Christian in 1900 but was over 45 percent Christian by 2000. (This compares to Islam’s growth in African from 32 percent to 40 percent.) About 20 percent of the world’s Christians now live in Africa, and rates of active church attendance are higher in Africa than in much of old Christendom. One Congolese bishop estimated that more Congolese are in a United Methodist Church on a typical Sunday than in all the United States.

S.D. Smith asks whether the gospel can be given all the well without words, as the saying goes. “But the Gospel is words. It is news, Good News. It is not anything, it is something. It is particular information. . . . The victory is sealed. The Victor is enthroned.“

“Reformed Theology? There’s an App for That.”

This is only slightly less awesome than the potato warmer app I designed.