Christmas Treat

I just finished Bruce David Forbes’ Christmas: A Candid History.
Forbes is a religious studies professor at Morningisde College and serves with Rachel (my wife) on the Board of Alternatives for Simple Living.
I found a good, more complete review than I will be offering here. This is a well-written, scholarly yet accessible read about Christmas. I [...]

Brand Loyalty

I don’t usually think of myself as particularly brand-loyal.  Something I did this weekend has me thinking otherwise.
Rachel and I were in Arlington for my parent’s 50th anniversary, and, upon checking into the hotel Thursday night, realized we had forgotten to bring toothpaste. I went on a quick quest for toothpaste.
As I pulled into the [...]

New Word, Same Old World

The New Oxford American Dictionary has announced it’s 2009 word of the Year: unfriend (HT cNet).
Surely this is clear testimony to the role Facebook has played in our collective lives recently.  Facebook now claims over 300 million members.
I think I’ve only unfriended one person.  I am not particularly strict on friending people.  I’ve got at [...]

Are you in it for the Long Haul?

Driving by Baylor this morning on my way to Common Grounds Coffee House, I noticed a field of yuong, recently planted oak trees.  Here is a picture of one of them.
Upon seeing this field, I remembered, for some reason, that it had once been occupied by a building. This building had once been a set [...]

I’m Through Waiting

Listening to John Mayer’s “Waiting for the world to change” in a nearby office brought clarity to me on a recent matter of discussion.
If you are old enough to ask for ID, you are too old to be trick-or-treating!
For a coupe of years now I have noticed instances of people clearly old enough to be [...]

Spiritual Consumption Disorder(s)?

I am reading David Walsh PhD.’s Why Do They Act That Way? for the class I am taking that is called The Adolescent Brain. In the chapter on Adolescent Mental Illness, under Eating Disorders, Walsh writes this:
We deluge kids with supersized portions of high-calorie junk food as we simultaneously glorify unhealthy, unrealistic thinness.
Because I am [...]

Money money money money

I’d like to pick up from one point that Michael Slaughter made Friday:
If it isn’t good news for the poor, it isn’t good news
This point went nearly unnoticed in my post yesterday, but it reminded me of something I posted a little under a month ago under the heading of  “THE Christian view on Health [...]

The Power of Rock and Roll

The Heart of Rock and Roll is still beating.
Do you think Lynyrd Skynyrd had this in mind when they came out with “Sweet Home Alabama” in 1974?

Commercializing Ministry?

Some of the bloggers I follow have moved their blogs to beliefnet. This includes Ben Witherington, Scot McKnight,  Tony Jones, and others. I don’t know te motivations, or variety thereof, behind signing on with beliefnet.
But I do know this: everytime I go to a beliefnet.com blog, I get an ad that opens down over the [...]

Music as Industry or Art?

This week’s The Economist has a piece about music piracy online.  I don’t care (or have the expertise) to get into all the details of this issue, but want to launch off this:
Retail music sales are falling so quickly, in part because of file-sharing, that there may not be much of an industry to protect [...]