I don’t often share my spiritual insights, mostly because I have so few. But this came to me during my Bible reading today. For what it’s worth.
“Repentance” means turning your back on sin, and turning to God. This does not mean, as we imagine, a turning from adventurous living to conformist living. It means turning from a place where we feel safe, to the place where we are most afraid to go.
I’ve written before in this space about the Norwegian lay preacher Hans Nielsen Hauge. He was the founder of what some would call the “sect” I grew up in, our prophet and martyr, you might say. And yet, oddly, we rarely read anything he actually wrote. We concentrated on the Scriptures—and I like to think he’d have been pleased about that.
I’m also beginning to think it was, in certain ways, a good thing.
His opponents and critics accused him of being heterodox to Lutheran theology.
I’ll probably get in trouble for writing this, but I’ve been reading his works in the original Norwegian, and I’ve come to believe that, to some extent, his critics were correct.
I hasten to add that the error I think I see occurs in one of Hauge’s earliest books. It’s known that he mellowed his views in later years, and so I hope I may believe he amended his error (if I’ve understood him correctly). Continue reading A cautionary tale for the converted
“These are songs about growing up on a tough planet,” said Springsteen, telling reporters that when the idea of humans and aliens working side by side in an extraterrestrial labor colony first occurred to him, he immediately knew he “had to tell their story.” “The Martians aren’t trying to run away from their lives or make excuses. They’re proud of what they do and where they’re from, even if the high-impact ion-compression carbonate mining industry isn’t what it used to be,” the Onion New Network reports.
Hits you deep. Hmm.
One of the keys to a long career in law enforcement is learning how to tell police psychologists what they need to hear without sounding deceptive. The only alternative is good mental health, which to me has always seemed too unrealistic a goal.
That’s Houston Police Detective Roland March, hero of J. Mark Bertrand’s crime novel Pattern of Wounds, a sequel to Back On Murder. I liked the first book very much, and I think I liked this one even more. Bertrand is doing almost exactly the thing I’ve tried to do (with far less success) in my own fantasy novels—to portray the real world through eyes of faith, giving both believers and unbelievers a fair chance to make their cases.
Roland March is a Houston cop, at once admired and disliked in his department because of his erratic career history. Successful enough as a crime solver to have been the subject of two true crime novels, he went through a slump period (following the death of his daughter in a car accident with a drunk driver) during which he seemed to be on the way out. In this book he tells us something we didn’t know before about that period—he was cutting corners because he didn’t trust the justice system. Always staying within the limits of strict legality (or so he believed), he nevertheless bent the law in order to insure “true justice” as he saw it. Continue reading Pattern of Wounds, by J. Mark Bertrand
Tim Challies reviews what looks to be a stirring e-book on the life of Leonard Ravenhill: In Light of Eternity
“He especially deplored the weakness of the praying of most local churches. He felt the strongest meeting of the church should be the church prayer meeting, but said that it was generally the weakest, if it even existed at all.” In his lifetime Ravenhill saw the daily or weekly prayer meeting disappearing from most local churches. This grieved him because he “directly connected the effectiveness of true ministry with the prayer life of the church.”
Prof. Brendan Riley (you know, the guy teaching the zombies in popular culture course) reviews Dr. Robert A. Burton’s book, On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not
I’ve noticed an odd phenomenon over the years. The very people who, you would think, would be able to give the best advice on raising children seem to be oddly reticent to offer a list of rules. And the more children they have, the more reticent they are.
Fortunately, there is an ever-growing demographic of people who have no such shyness about sharing their views on child-rearing. These, of course, are the people who (like me) have no children of their own.
I saw this article today (hat tip Strange Herring) on a recent study that concluded that children who watched “Sponge Bob Square Pants” showed decreased attention spans, as compared to children who watched “Caillou,” and a control group who (I assume) used a magnifying glass to fry ants. Continue reading A modest educational proposal
Editor Nick Harrison has a post on how a writer should attempt to find the right editor or agent for his material, not just the first available. One editor may reject a manuscript or cover letter on a technicality; another may give it a chance.
The first commenter on this post, Tim Riter, offers this illustration from his experience. “For two of my books, I sent in a proposal to an editor, who promptly rejected it with the nicest form rejection letter. Within a year, at writers conferences I met another editor from each of those houses with whom she, I, and the book clicked, and the houses bought it.”
Here’s a list of nine Twitter accounts which harken directly to famous literary figures, such as Charles Dickens, James Boswell, and Alexander Pope.
