Links to start the week

As you can see if you look back through my posts, these “links” entries are pretty irregular, and that will probably continue. Some things I link immediately, but to avoid many short posts I post collections like this one.

Let me start with things I’ve collected, in categories.

Bible Translations

There was an excellent, dispassionate review of the TNIV on This Lamp, titled Today’s New International Version (Top Ten Bible Versions #2). If you are still considering the TNIV, this is a good review to read.

Suzanne McCarthy, producer of many excellent posts over at Better Bibles Blog, has a new entry titled Apology to my pastor’s wife, which deals with some of the sheer ignorance that can characterize the controversy about gender language in Bible translation. (“Sheer ignorance” is my term, not hers; she’s more polite than that.) This is the only post I’m going to link from Better Bibles, but just note that I subscribe to their RSS feed, and I read pretty much everything over there. If you’re interested in Bible translations, I think it’s a “must read” site.

Faith and Theology

I would like to commend a series of posts on Rad’s Methodist Blog on his Faith Journey. I don’t see this series as earth shattering, but I think there is a great value in personal testimony, and I appreciate his commentary on the various phases of his spiritual life.

Relieved and Hopeful from connexions started an interesting discussion on the killing of al Zarqawi. The discussion definitely looks like fun.

After Shane Raynor posted on worship, and I posted about his post, considerable discussion followed. I’d like to add Youth When the Church was Young (hat tip Locusts and Honey post on the topic), which talks about youth taking on real Christianity. I would like to challenge the concept that worship must be either entertaining or filled with content. I think worship can be enjoyable, educational, and really be about God, all at the same time. Perhaps I’ll have to write some more on this topic. In the meantime, reading about youth in the early church may challenge some preconceptions!

Creation and Evolution

Out of many excellent posts, I just want to highlight Laudan, demarcation and the vacuity of Intelligent design, which discusses the boundaries between science and not-science, but more importantly the boundaries between good science and bad.

My own Blogging

Other than the entry on worship that I noted above, I also continued blogging through the book of Hebrews on the Participatory Bible Study blog, with entries on Hebrews 11, and Hebrews 1:5-14.

On the <a href="http://hneufeld.com/jevlir"Jevlir Caravansary, I wrote short notes on three science fiction/fantasy books.

I really need to keep better track of all the things I read so I can point out the best, but this gives you some idea.