Friday Funny #1

That's wack!

Death by hide-a-bed...oh, the dignity.

A Russian woman in St Petersburg killed her drunk husband with a folding couch, Russian media reported on Wednesday.

St Petersburg's Channel Five said the man's wife, upset with her husband for being drunk and refusing to get up, kicked a handle after an argument, activating a mechanism that folds the couch up against a wall. The couch, which doubles as a bed, folds up automatically in order to save space. The man fell between the mattress and the back of the couch, Channel Five quoted emergency workers as saying. The woman then walked out of the room and returned three hours later to check on what she thought was an unusually quiet sleeping husband.

The St. Petersburg Emergency Services Ministry said a private rescue service removed the man's body. Video on the television channel's website showed emergency workers sawing away the side panels of a couch to remove a man in his underwear lying headfirst between teh cushions. Emergency workers said the man died instantly.

Police refused to comment. http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSL0919437820080709

Seth Godin

Seth Godin is a highly regarded guru in the advertising/marketing arena. He is, allegedly, the most popular marketing blogger on the web and I recently picked up three of his books at my local library. No, I'm not looking for a career change, I simply believe that marketers tend to have a good read on culture at large. And studying our culture, by borrowing from their insights, is an okay thing for ministers.

The three books I picked up were Purple Cow, the dip and Meatball Sundae.

I really enjoyed Purple Cow and will share some thoughts from it. It was published in 2002 and the subtitle is Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable. The first 20-25 pages are excellent layouts of some past and present cultural distinctives; I strongly encourage you to read them. What follows are page #s and quotes:

p.4 "This is a book about why you need to put a Purple Cow into everything you build, why TV and mass media are no longer your secret weapons, and why the profession of marketing has been changed forever. Stop advertising and start innovating."

p.6 Here he shares Geoff Moore's idea diffusion curve (innovators, early adopters...) and I had never seen it in print, it's helpful.

p.7 "Instead of accepting that the old ways are fading away (fast), most companies with a product to market are treating these proven new techniques as interesting fads - worth another look but not worth using as the center of their strategy."

p.10 "The world has changed. There are far more choices, but there is less and less time to sort them out."

Miscellaneous: "It's safer to be risky." People are tuning out. Younger people are just automatically wired to tune out mass media. I think his descriptions and assessments of our culture are 'spot on.' I also appreciate how he uses real-life examples and the fact that he barely uses statistics.

Read Purple Cow! It's only 137 small pages and is very interesting; like I said, the first 20-25 pages are excellent! While this book is about marketing and making money and finding the answers within yourself and your strategies, there are some keen cultural insights for church world.

the dip is a book about knowing when to quit and when to tough it out. I liked his basic disagreement with Vince Lombardi ("Winners never quit.") because it made sense. This book is very short and aesthetically attractive but I'm not gonna buy it or recommend it to anyone.

Meatball Sundae didn't grab me like the other two and I didn't finish it. But I sure like the cover and I see an unforgettable eating contest item in the near future.

Time for Truth

Os Guinness' book, Time For Truth, is a short, pointed, and descriptive work about the cultural and spiritual times we find ourselves in. From the jacket: "In the West today it appears that truth in any objective form is dead. At best it is relative and at worst it is created. Where does that leave us?"

Having heard him a few years ago and having read his well-known book, The Call, I have come to appreciate this intellectual's desire and ability to explain his thoughts and observations and, in turn, to call believers to action. Here are some thoughts that caught my attention:

p.67 "We are told that in the weeks before Thomas Jefferson's death on July 4, 1826, he invited all his grandchildren to Monticello and urged them each to "pursue virtue, be true and truthful." Truth, he ssaw with twilight clarity, was essential to freedom. Yet as one historian observes, Jefferson's belief that "Truth is great and will prevail" (an old Irish saying) is today "more prayer than an axiom."

p.75 "Let me underscore again. I am not countering the postmodern view of truth on behalf of the modern. One is as bad as the other; the postmodern is the direct descendant of the modern and the mirror image of its deficiencies. It is the more dangerous today only because it is more current."

p.115 "...on the one hand the Jewish and Christian faiths join the modern thinker to insist on the objectivity of truth, while on the other they stand with the postmodern thinker to acknowledge the subjectivitity we bring to truth, including our own personal distortions. Within the biblical view, humans are truth-twisters as well as truth-seekers."

p.124 "If we would live free, we must not just know the truth, we must live in truth and we must become people of truth. As Kierkegaard wrote in Training in Christianity: 'The truth consists not of knowing the truth but in being the truth.'"

p.125 "...the biblical...view of truth has the strengths of the modern and postmodern views, the weakness of neither, and just one snag: the cost of its unsparing moral challenge."

I have one more batch of quotes from Guinness' book, Time For Truth, that I'll save for another entry. If any of these jump out at you, positively or negatively, let me know because I'm curious. Have a good one!

Summer

Summer is supposed to be a relaxing time away from the routine of the school year -- sez who!? Things don't slow down; it actually feels like quite the opposite.

For YPs, it's intense because we're working out whatever plans we made, trying to enjoy some summer-time-family-time and plan for the fall/next school year. Because the family is so available, it's a great opportunity to be together. But everybody else is more available too. Anyways, it's a challenging season.

I love the weather, the change in routine and the fact that seasonal ice cream shops are open for business. Thank you God for Summer!

Tidbits from The Reason for God #3

Here are some tidbits from chapter 14, The Dance of God.

p. 214 "In self-centeredness we demand that others orbit around us...The inner life of the triune God, however, is utterly different. The life of the Trinity is characterized not by self-centeredness but by mutually self-giving love. When we delight and serve someone else, we enter into a dynamic orbit around him or her, we center on the interests and desires of the other. That creates a dance, particularly if there are three persons, each of whom moves around the other two...Each of the divine persons centers upon the others. None demands that the others revolve around him. Each voluntarily circles the other two...That creates a dynamic, pulsating dance of joy and love."

p.217 "You will nver get a sense of self by standing still, as it were, and making everything revolve around your needs and interests. Unless you are willing to experience the loss of options and the individual limitations that comes from being in committed relationships, you will remain out fo touch with your own nature and the nature of things...We were made for mutually self-giving, other-directed love. Self-centeredness destroys the fabric of what God has made."

p.218 "He has infinite happiness not through self-centeredness, but through self-giving, other-centered love. And the only way we, who have been created in his image, can have this same joy, is if we center our entire lives around him instead of ourselves."

p. 218 Quoting historian George Marsden's summary of Jonathan Edwards' idea: "Why would such an infinitely good, perfect, and eternal being create? The ultimate reason that God creates is not to remedy some lack in God, but to extend that perfect internal communication of the triune God's goodness and love...The universe is an explosion of God's glory."

p.224 "Jesus's life, death, and resurrection was an infinitely costly rescue operation...To be a Christian today is to become part of that same operation..."

I certainly enjoyed the book and will be reaching for it regularly. Let me know if anything stuck out to you.

New Books!

After abstaining from book-buying for what seemed like a looooong time, I made a 7-book purchase on July 3rd from Westminster Books (http://www.wtsbooks.com/) and they just arrived (July 8!). Here they are:

God's Big Picture - Vaughn Roberts
the enemy within - Kris Lundgaard
When Sinners Say "I Do" - Dave Harvey
Heaven and Hell - Edward Donnelly
Self-Image - Lou Priolo
Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin - Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
Esther & Ruth: Reformed Expository Commentary - Iain Duguid

Since blogging seems to be a good way for me to process or reprocess a book, I'm sure something about these will appear in the near future. So which one's first?!

Jack Reacher

I have recently discovered and greatly enjoyed the written work of Lee Child. In particular, a character he created named Jack Reacher. When I see the opportunity coming, I've been swinging by the library to pick up another story about Jack's adventures.

What I like about Child's style is the short chapters, the constant development of the story and a simple amount of layers. I also appreciate the relatively minor sexual stuff. If my memory serves me correctly (it's been several years since I spent any time with fiction), many books in this genre have sexual scenes that contribute little, if anything, to the story. Let's keep the focus on the crisis and the solution, not the bedroom; thanks Lee Child.

Jack is a former MP; a very observant, powerful and cunning one at that. Since retiring from the service he has drifted around at his own whim seeking to enjoy what unstructured life has to offer. But trouble often finds him and he's man enough to step up and help sort things out. Who doesn't like the tender-hearted giant? The bad guys, that's who!

I started and finished Bad Luck and Trouble over the July 4th weekend. It was fun because it tied in elements from Reacher's typically vague past. And although I don't usually try to figure the story out, I did anticipate a few things and that gave me a tidbit of satisfaction. It also largely took place in California. Before that I read The Hard Way which takes place primarily in New York City but goes out of country and was a fun read.

If you're looking for a solitary hero who works with his hands and his head (not like McGyver, way more violent) check out Jack Reacher in one of Lee Child's fast-paced and not overly complex books.

Tidbits from The Reason for God #2

Part 2 of Keller's book deals with 'The Reasons for Faith'. The seven topics are:

8 - The Clues of God
9 - The Knowledge of God
10 - The Problem of Sin
11 - Religion and the Gospel
12 - The (True) Story of the Cross
13 - The Reality of the Resurrection
14 - The Dance of God

As with Part 1 I really enjoyed Keller's style - quick and substantive; he gives you alot to chew on and talk about. Here are some tidbits from chapters 8-13 that caught my eye; they are listed by chapter #, page # and then the tidbit.

8, p.129 Quoting Francis Collins "I can't imagine how nature, in this case the universe, could have created itself."

8, p.132 "There is something about nature that is much more striking and inexplicable than its design. All scientific, inductive reasoning is based on the assumption of the regularity (the "laws") of nature...Most people find that normal and untroubling...science cannot prove the continued regularity of nature, it can only take it on faith...As a proof for the existence of God, the regularity of nature is escapable. You can always say, "We don't know why things are as they are." As a clue for God, however, it is helpful."

9, p.153 "If there is no god, then there is no way to say any action is "moral" and another "immoral" but only "I like this."...if there is no God, then all moral statements are arbitrary, all moral valuations are subjective and internal, and there can be no external moral standard by which a person's feeling and values are judged."

9, p.156 "If a premise ("There is no God") leads to a conclusion you know isn't true ("Napalming babies is culturally relative") then why not change the premise?"

11, p. 177 "If you are avoiding sin and living morally so that God will have to bless and save you, then ironically, you may be looking to Jesus as a teacher, model, and helper but you are avoiding him as Savior...That, ironically, is a rejection of the gospel of Jesus. It is a Christianized form of religion. It is possible to avoid Jesus as Savior as much by keeping all the Biblical rules as by breaking them."

11, p.177 "Both religion (in which you build your identity on your moral achievements) and irreligion (in which you build your identity on some other secular pursuit or relationship) are, ultimately, spiritually identical courses to take. Both are "sin.""

12, p.187 "...the cost of the damage must be borne by someone. Either you or he absorbs the cost for the deed, but the debt does not somehow vanish into thin air."

12, p.189 "She went through the suffering of costly forgiveness, which at first always feels far worse than before it can be felt, but it does come eventually. It leads to a new peace, a resurrection. It is the only way to stop the spread of the evil."

13, p.205 "If there had been only an empty tomb and no sighting, no one would have concluded it was a resurrection. They would have assumed that the body had been stolen. Yet if there had been only eyewitness sightings of Jesus and no empty tomb, no one would have concluded it was a resurrection, because people's accounts of seeing departed loved ones happen all the time. Only if the two factors were both true together would anyone have concluded that Jesus was raised from the dead."