New Readership and New Readings

Fun videos from two other authors on here took readership numbers to record heights. With a current average of about 30 pageveiws from 9 unique visitors (IP addresses) per day, the recent video posts inspired one day with 61 pageviews from 23 unique visitors. It's great to have others contributing.

Here are some readings that I enjoyed over the past couple weeks.

Toddlers who tell lies early on are more likely to do well later, researchers claim. A Canadian study of 1,200 children aged two to 17 suggests those who are able to lie have reached an important developmental stage.

Police crackdown on hate crime across London: Raids across London have been carried out by the Metropolitan Police as part of an operation to crackdown on hate crime. Between March 2009 and April 2010 there were 51,839 domestic violence offences, 9,914 racial offences and 1,336 homophobic offences committed in London.

Many Christian bloggers responded to this post: Does God delight in non-Christian art? It's a thoughtful article. However, I would have asked: how does God delight in non-Christian art? God's love for art seems obvious. What isn't so clear lately is if God has much to delight over in Christian art.

Hunter, Crouch, and Colson on To Change the World: Christians need to abandon talk about "redeeming the culture," "advancing the kingdom," and "changing the world." Such talk carries too much weight, implying conquest and domination. If there is a possibility for human flourishing in our world, it does not begin when we win the culture wars but when God's word of love becomes flesh in us, reaching every sphere of social life. When faithful presence existed in church history, it manifested itself in the creation of hospitals and the flourishing of art, the best scholarship, the most profound and world-changing kind of service and care—again, not only for the household of faith but for everyone. Faithful presence isn't new; it's just something we need to recover.

Here's a lovely and godless recognition of something terrible and glorious about humanity: "Might not the human brain, that most complex object known to exist in the universe, have undergone a qualitative change as well? If my metaphor only suggests the possibility that our species is more than an optimized ape, that something terrible and glorious befell us—if this is merely another fable, it might at least encourage an imagination of humankind large enough to acknowledge some small fragment of the mystery we are."

Several Christian bloggers responded to this article where Kathleen Parker used her column in The Washington Post to take on Franklin Graham and his belief that belief in Jesus Christ is the only way of salvation.

Justin Taylor appreciated that "Doug Wilson has been interacting with some of John Piper's thinking on Christian Hedonism—not disagreeing per se, but taking it 'further up and further in.'" Wilson reflected on our relationship to God's gifts: "I have to think about the fact that my feet are not cold anymore, that it is time for dinner, that one of my shoulder blades itches, and so on. To use Lewis' conceit from the toolshed, I have to spend a lot of time looking at the sunbeams, and a fraction of my time is set aside for direct worship of God, looking along the sunbeam. The temptation we have is that of treating all this as a zero-sum game, assuming that any time spent on the gifts is necessarily time away from the Giver. But though this sometimes happens, it does not need to happen. Rightly handled, a gift is never detached from the one who gave it."