Wisdom For Your Weekend: your weekly installment of things we’ve been reading (and watching) around the web.
Video of the Week
How to Make Small Talk with Strangers, The Art of Manliness. Some people are naturally good at small talk. I (Chris) envy those people. If you’re anything like me, you may have been so consistently bad at small talk that you’ve developed a moral superiority about it. “I don’t like small talk; I prefer real conversations.” But as Brett McKay reminds us, you can’t have real conversations without the on-ramp. Here’s help for the awkward among us. (Reminder: despite their name, “Art of Manliness” is not just for men.)
Articles of the Week
Five Ways to Read a Blog Post Without Getting Your Jimmies Rustled, Paula Hendricks. The title alone should motivate you to read this one. Hendricks takes a couple verses from James and updates them for our blogging culture. Instead of “slow to anger,” blog readers should be “slow to get their jimmies rustled.” Those of us in the blog world can attest: Hendricks speaks the truth.
Read Better and Retain More, Trevin Wax. I read a lot. And I find that it’s generally easier to slog through a book—even a difficult one—than it is to retain what you’ve read afterwards. The more books you plow through, the more likely that interesting self-help book from the summer of 2004 is going to fade in the recesses of your memory (thank goodness). So what’s a reader to do? Wax offers his way forward, and while it differs markedly from mine, it should prove beneficial for most.
Five Principles of the New Sexual Morality, Alistair Roberts. Just this week I had a conversation with a friend about what the next steps will be in the current “sexual revolution.” Contrary to many conservative fears, we won’t see a complete rejection of morality and a slippery slope into complete sexual anarchy. There is a logic and a morality behind what society is (wrongly) pushing today. If we want to counter the growing sexual revolution appropriately, we have to understand it first. Roberts summarizes it better than anyone I’ve yet seen.
Thoughts on Note-Taking During Sermons, Jared Wilson. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones once said that he spent half his time convincing his congregation to care about theology, and the other half of his time that theology wasn’t enough. A similar dynamic seems to be at play when it comes to taking notes during a sermon. We certainly want people to pay attention and retain what they hear…but we also don’t want them thinking of the sermon as a lecture. The point of a lecture is information, but the point of a sermon is worship.
On The Lighter Side
10-Year-Old Reporter Stumps NFL Stars, NBC Sports. Last week, W4YW’s “Lighter Side” cast a negative light on reporters. So let’s balance things out: this week’s clip features the reporter as the hero.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UoG6cv6i_c
Wisdom For Your Weekend is presented to you by Chris Pappalardo, with occasional guidance from J.D. Greear. This is our attempt to reflect Proverbs 9:9: “Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be still wiser; teach a righteous man, and he will increase in learning.”
