Your weekly installment of things we’ve been reading around the web.
Book Review of the Week
Flannery O’Connor’s Recently Released Prayer Journal, Russell Moore. “On my Christmas list of gifts to buy my evangelical friends, there’s a little book of prayers. This is less predictable than it may seem, since the prayers aren’t from a celebrity evangelical preacher, but from a morbid, quirky Catholic who spent her short life with pet peacocks and wooden-leg-stealing Bible salesman stories. But I think Flannery O’Connor’s newly published ‘Prayer Journal’ is exactly what Christians need, maybe especially at Christmas. The prayers are jarring because they are so personal and raw, clearly not written to ‘edify the saints’ in a published manuscript. They are, well, just prayers.”
Articles of the Week
Proverbs 29:25 and 13 Things ‘Mentally Strong’ People Do. Cheryl Conner. Conner examines what makes a person “mentally strong” (courtesy of Amy Morin). Or, to be more precise, Conner examines what mentally strong people avoid. Reading it I was reminded of this verse, “The fear of man lays a snare; but whoever trusts in the Lord is safe.” Repeatedly on this list, in one form or another, is the ever-dangerous fear of man.
32 Things You Might Not Know About Charles Spurgeon, Stephen McCaskell. One of the more surprising: “One woman was converted through reading a single page of one of Spurgeon’s sermons wrapped around some butter she had bought.” (The sermons wrapped around butter these days are much less interesting.)
Do Your Kids Know the Gospel? Ed Stetzer. Most parents have a plan to develop their children physically; do you have a plan to help them grow spiritually as well? And how, exactly, do you avoid moralism (which often makes for well-behaved kids) in favor of teaching the gospel?
20 Things the Rich Do Every Day, Dave Ramsey.
This article sparked a good bit of controversy. Some of the responses were merely rants because this article challenges some cherished political assumptions about poverty, but the better ones stemmed from an objection to the implication in Ramsey’s article that low-income people are poor because they do these things, when it is also possible that they do these things because they are poor–their poverty arising from other circumstances outside of their control.
Both dimensions ought to be considered, but I do agree with Ramsey that the first step to personal empowerment is taking personal responsibility for your life, and most people in our society are in a place, however disadvantaged, to take responsibility for their lives. Taking personal responsibility for one’s life might very well look like these things Ramsey highlights. So whether these things are the cause of, or the result of, success, they are still worth considering as fruits of an empowered, biblically-wise life.
On The Lighter Side
This map shows the origin of your state’s name. Native American names lead the list. But some of these were rather surprising. Like Idaho, which holds the distinction for being the only state whose name was completely fabricated. Only in America, I suppose.
