Your weekly installment of things we’ve been reading around the web.
Video of the Week
John Piper and Tim Keller Discuss the Influence of C.S. Lewis on Their Lives
Articles of the Week
Return of the “Jesus Wars,” Ross Douthat. “Part of the lure of the New Testament is the complexity of its central character — the mix of gentleness and zeal, strident moralism and extraordinary compassion, the down-to-earth and the supernatural.
Most ‘real Jesus’ efforts, though, assume that these complexities are accretions, to be whittled away to reach the historical core. Thus instead of a Jesus who contains multitudes, we get Jesus the nationalist or Jesus the apocalyptic prophet or Jesus the sage or Jesus the philosopher and so on down the list.
There’s enough gospel material to make any of these portraits credible. But they also tend to be rather, well, boring, and to raise the question of how a pedestrian figure — one zealot among many, one mystic in a Mediterranean full of them — inspired a global faith.”
10 Things Every Christian Should Know About Islam, Zane Pratt. Having lived in a Muslim country for a couple of years, I get a lot of questions about Islam. There’s a lot more to it than this, but this is great primer on the subject from someone with years of experience.
My Husband Treats Me Horribly But Still Expects Sex, Leslie Vernick, Christ-Centered Counseling. “No one likes feeling like an object. Husbands sometimes complain to me that they feel that their wives treat them like a paycheck. Wives complain that they don’t feel like a loved person, but merely a sexual object or a slave.”
Three People You Need to Ignore Online, Jon Acuff. I still feel a little guilty when I ignore people, even anonymous online people who only want to tear down. Is it ever right to write someone off? Who and when?
Community Is Frightening: Get Over Your Fear, Courtney Reissig. “We all commiserate about our problems with the latest book in hand that promises to give us all the answers we need when maybe, just maybe, there is an older, wiser man or woman in our church who can not only give us answers, but hold our hands and tell us everything is going to work out just fine.”
On The Lighter Side
Famous Actors (Who Didn’t Get the Parts) Audition for “The Office”
http://twentytwowords.com/2013/08/06/famous-actors-who-didnt-get-the-parts-audition-for-the-office-in-2003/
