Tag Archives: evil

Dec 17 2012

this went thru my mind

 

Evil, gun control, mental illness & violence: * Violence: The Issue We Must Face by K. Rex Butts; * I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother by Liza Long; * [required reading]; * The Slaughtering of the Innocents—- Again by Ben Witherington

“… I’m angry because violence has in many ways become our way of life.  What I want to know is why are we so violent?  Yet this seems to be a question that people want to evade.”

“I live with a son who is mentally ill. I love my son. But he terrifies me.”

“I was watching an interview this week after the massacre in Newtown and the inevitable question was asked— ‘What could we do to prevent this from happening again?’ The candid answer given by a former head of various FBI operations was as follows— ‘absolutely nothing unless we are prepared to significantly change our gun laws and also change what we do with the mentally ill’. But even that would not be enough because some mass murderers are not technically deranged, they are simply wicked. There is a difference.”

Ministry, preaching & tragedy: * Tim Keller on the Connecticut School Shooting…Final Thoughts before Preaching Today; * Christmas in Connecticut: Touching the Pain of the World; * President Obama’s Homily in Newtown— 2 Cor. 4.7-18 [required viewing; 18 min. video clip]

“As a minister, of course, I’ve spent countless hours with people who are struggling and wrestling with the biggest question – the WHY question in the face of relentless tragedies and injustices. And like all ministers or any spiritual guides of any sort, I scramble to try to say something to respond and I always come away feeling inadequate and that’s not going to be any different today. But we can’t shrink from the task of responding to that question.”

“Christmas is touching the pain of the world, experiencing it as real…and then choosing to have hope.”

“It is indeed a rare thing to see a President offer a homily on national TV broadcast to the whole nation. Here is the 18 minute eulogy and homily he offered in Newtown …”

Oct 28 2012

picture Bible commentary

By trusting in emptiness and speaking deceit, they conceive harm and give birth to malice. They … weave spiderwebs. … Their webs can’t serve as clothing; they can’t cover themselves with their deeds. Their deeds are deeds of malice, and the work of violence is in their hands. Their feet run to evil; they rush to shed innocent blood. Their thoughts are thoughts of malice; desolation and destruction litter their highways. They don’t know the way of peace; there’s no justice in their paths. They make their roads crooked; no one who walks in them knows peace. (Isaiah 59.4-8)

Sep 27 2012

this went thru my mind

 

Choices, evil & good: The Banality of Goodness by Richard Beck [required reading]

“Evil is ordinary people thoughtlessly making a million small choices.”

Death & dying: Five Reasons We Fear Dying by Caleb Wilde

“Here are five reasons we fear dying.”

Facebook: Require Approval for All Facebook Photo or Comment Tags by Dave Taylor

“Facebook … makes it really easy to tag people in pictures and status updates, even without that person giving approval … You can always untag yourself from Facebook photos or comments, but that’s after the fact. What most people don’t realize is that there’s a way you can set up your privacy settings so that you have to explicitly approve all tags before they show up on Facebook.”

Family: Family First!— Not a Biblical Viewpoint by Ben Witherington [required reading]

“… the Bible, and especially the NT, does not encourage us to put the physical family first. … Frankly, this is entirely false and a bad theology, especially a bad theology of calling.”

Hospice: All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Hospice by David Calhoun

“Forgiveness is best not left to the death bed.”

Jesus/wife manuscript: Update on the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife (from Craig A. Evans)

“Is the Coptic papyrus, in which Jesus speaks of his ‘wife,’ a fake? Probably. We are far from a ‘consensus,’ but one scholar after another and one Coptologist after another has weighed in pointing out serious problems with the paleography, the syntax, and the very troubling fact that almost all of the text has been extracted from the Gospel of Thomas (principally from logia 30, 101, and 114).”

Leadership: 16 Things Successful Leaders Never Do by Dan Rockwell

“Never create the future by recreating the past.”

Ministry & people: * One Question Every Church Leader Should Ask by Jim Martin; * Stop Trying to Fix People’s Problems by Sam S. Rainer

* “What is it like to be someone else in your church?”

* “Stop trying to fix people’s problems. Lower the expectations of your ability to solve the problem. Raise the expectations to see Christ as the answer.”

Women: Jesus and Women in the Gospels by Joshua Graves

“I know what Paul said in I Timothy 2 and I Cor. 11. But before you tell me what Paul said, can you first tell me what Jesus did?”