Round and round we go

Once again, there are too many good things going on around the blogosphere! Here are a few things that jumped out at me this last week:

Ted, at The Jesus Community, talks about a message he heard about Dying to live. By the way, his dad died this weekend, please remember the family in prayer.

Alan, at The Assembling of the Church, has a good series on connecting the dots. Huh? Yep, connecting the dots. Scripture doesn’t fill in all the dots when it comes to life; we need help connecting the dots, filling in the holes. He has a series of posts on how that works (or doesn’t, in some cases).

Then, there is the post by Chris Heard about Religion as wish fulfillment. He was listening to Alister McGrath’s rejoinder to Dawkins God Delusion: “McGrath’s point—and I think it is a good one—is that a person’s desire for an claim to be true does not automatically render that claim false. McGrath offers the following analogy: suppose I am thirsty and want a drink of water. Does my desire for a drink of water render the bottled water in my refrigerator nonexistent? Of course not.” Good stuff; read the rest of it.

Out of Ur seems to be outdoing themselves of late. There was a post on Muscular Christianity recently. The summary paragraph:

All of these thoughts can be summarized as a commitment to weakness rather than strength. “Muscular Christianity” and “robust faith” are views that worked well in modernity’s concrete world, but the viability of Christian faith in the twenty-first century is not guaranteed by claims to power and declarations of strengths and doctrinal postures. This is not a slide into relativism but a commitment to nondogmatic specificity. We can tell the gospel story without resorting to competition, exclusivism, or elitism.

Ben Myers, at Faith and Theology, has a short post on doing theology in the second person, which ties in nicely with my readings in Eastern Orthodox Christianity, although he quotes from Augustine:

Although it’s necessary to practise theology in the third person – theology as academic reflection – we shouldn’t forget that theology is always most at home when it takes the form of second-person address. In the best theological work ever written – Augustine’s Confessions – theological reflection becomes indistinguishable from prayer; talk about God merges with talk to God.

And, lets not forget the publicity department : ) Jim West points us to a poll to rank the biblioblogs here. You have to log in to that river in Brazil in order to vote. But, I encourage you to buy your books from Eisenbrauns instead! But then, what did you expect me to say?