Category: Blog Carnivals

The latest Christian carnival is Ancient Hebrew Poetry.

It’s the day after Christmas and what a mess! I bet that’s what many are saying, anyhow. Our Christmas has been very quiet this year. That’s because my wife ended up taking all the traditional holidays working, and our grandchildren don’t arrive until the end of the week. We’ve done a little bit, but the excitement starts when the grandkids arrive!

To divide up today’s carnival, I’ve chosen to use a phrase from the membership vows for the United Methodist Church. I don’t intend to be denominational on this, though I am a member of a United Methodist congregation. But I like the elements here. Each member promises to support the church through his or her “prayers, presence, gifts, and service.” As is usual, I’ll be using a bit of creativity in dividing the posts in order to create some balance. There wasn’t much on prayer, for example, but I’ll slide a couple of extras into the category. I’ve arbitrarily put the more theological posts under “presence” as when else would you hear about these things?

Prayers

Ched presents A Christmas Nightmare . . . posted at Says Simpleton.

James DeLelys presents Look with your Heart! posted at Author James DeLelys.

Jody Neufeld presents Oh Holy Night! a Christmas meditation based on the song at Jody Along the Path.

Presence

Don Bosch presents Divorce hurts the planet – II posted at The Evangelical Ecologist. “I’m hoping this will stimulate some thinking on the deeper impacts of human tragedies like divorce and abortion on Creation. The Catholic Church teaches that ‘Divorce is a grave offense against the natural law.’ It also states that ‘divorce is immoral also because it introduces disorder into the family and into society,’ a disorder that it states ‘makes it (divorce) truly a plague on society.’ Protestants (including garden variety evangelicals) aren’t used to considering marriage and divorce in such ‘natural law’ terms, but maybe we should. Folks from all parts of the Body of Christ have an important opportunity here for love and social influence through ecology that goes much deeper than recycling our plastic bottles. A shame if we continue to drop the ball on that. Would Jesus call our hearts hard too?”

Therapydoc presents Internet Pornography- Part One posted at Everyone Needs Therapy.
It’s a problem in every community. This is the first post in a series.

Steve Bishop, of An accidental blog, starts his review of J Mark Bertrand’s (Re)thinking Wolrdview: Learning to Think, Live, and Speak in this World (Crossway, 2007).

Jeremy Pierce presents Sex as a Condition for Marriage posted at Parableman. Some Christians have seen marriage as initiated by sex. The case of Joseph and Mary seems at odds with this view.

Martin presents Light upon the Earth posted at Enigmania.

Tom Gilson presents James Corbett “Taught Us How To Think”? posted at Thinking Christian. Whether James Corbett, accused of a strong anti-Christian bias in his high school history classroom, is guilty, we don’t know; but it certainly appears that he failed to do what some of his students claim he did: to teach them how to think.

Henry (Honzo) Imler presents The Basis for Belief: Part 1 posted at Theology for the Masses.

Gifts

FMF presents What is Your Attitude Toward Giving? posted at Free Money Finance. What type of giver are you?

Keyboard Culture Sales Training Expert Alan “Sell More” Altmann presents Fear and Faith are Incompatible posted at Alan Altmann Sales Training Expert at Keyboard Culture Expert Community, in which he reminds us that we have the choice of responding to situations in fear or in faith.

I present Not a Christmas Carol, a Christmas short story that’s not really like the famous Dickens story, at The Jevlir Caravansary.

Service

John presents Philophronos Blogging posted at Brain Cramps for God. A reminder, as we enter the intensity of the political season and celebrate His birth, about our requirements to show Christ’s grace and mercy even to our adversaries. And to tie in with his post, Laura rounds up the Philophronos blogroll.

Tom Fuerst presents Christian Discourse and Subverting the Rhetoric of the Empire posted at Theology for the Masses.

Roger Carr presents Share Your Faith posted at Everyday Giving Blog.

Keep Thinking about Jesus

There are reasons why that baby was in that manger. Amongst those is this, part of this week’s lectionary readings:

“Because he himself has passed through the test of suffering, he is able to help those who are in the midst of their test.” — Hebrews 2:18

There will be a Christian Carnival the day after Christmas, and it will be right here. Be sure to submit your posts. You can find the links to the carnival and the form at the bottom of the right sidebar.

. . . at Bounded Irrationality. Check it out.

. . . at Lo-Fi Tribe.

has been posted at The Minor Prophet.

In this week’s carnival Josiah Concept Ministries both tipped me off to, and responded to, an atheist, VJACK, who is reading the Bible through and commenting. Both posts make good reading.

But the final comment in VJACK’s post is pretty interesting:

Don’t get me wrong – I’m glad that today’s Christians ignore nearly all of the laws their biblical god hands down in these three books. And yet, I remain puzzled that anyone claiming to be a Christian can ignore all of this, selectively choosing the couple parts that make them feel good while neglecting the bulk of what is actually there. This is the sort of god who is unlikely to react favorably to such neglect. If I believed in such a god, I don’t think I’d go near anything containing yeast!

It’s important to look at when, where, and how particular laws apply. That’s why I like to remind people that nobody actually keeps all the laws in scripture, nor are they supposed to. There seems to be an assumption both amongst many Christians and amongst those who are not but yet study the Bible that it must be taken as a list of commands to be obeyed. But it is embedded in both a mythology and a history, and you have to ask where in this process each thing fits.

Further, you won’t all agree even then, and that’s not necessarily bad. There are more sources of information than the Bible, as I must so often remind my fellow Christians.

Barbara at Tidbits and Treasures discusses the efficacy of official days of prayer. I would say that personally I pray about just about everything, and yet I have a hard time seeing the value of a governor calling for prayer. But Barbara makes some interesting points.