On April 20, N.T. Wright will be speaking at Tim Keller’s church, Redeemer Presbyterian, in New York. He will be speaking at Redeemer’s Center for Faith and Work, “the cultural renewal arm of the Redeemer movement, founded to equip, connect, and mobilize our church community in their professional and industry spheres toward gospel-centered transformation for the common good.”
Wright will be discussing his new book, After You Believe. Here’s a sample:
Many people…find it all too easy to get the idea “that one can just believe in Jesus and then really do nothing else.” Many Christians have so emphasized the need for conversion, for the opening act of faith and commitment, for the initial statement of that faith (“believing that Jesus died for me” or whatever), that they have a big gap in their vision of what being a Christian is all about. It’s as though they were standing on one side of a deep, wide river, looking across to the further bank. On this bank you declare your faith. On the opposite bank is the ultimate result–final salvation itself. But what are people supposed to do in the meantime? Simply stand here and wait? Is there no bridge between the two? What does this say about faith itself? If we’re not careful…this opening act of belief can become “simply a matter of assent to a proposition (Jesus is Son of God, etc.), with no need for transformation.”
You can read some more samples from Wright’s book here.
If you want to attend the event at Redeemer, admission is $10 if registered by March 15, $20 thereafter. Here’s more info at the Center for Faith & Work.
A reader alerted me this week that the HCSB has moved to the number 5 spot in unit sales and dollar sales according to the Christian Booksellers Association.
Congrats, HCSB!
On a related note: here’s a survey you need to take about Bible translations: http://bit.ly/9RxW93
So I’ve been completely out of commission around here for a while. But it’s been for a really good reason: the 2010 Renew Conference.
We had Anthony Bradley, professor at The King’s College in New York, and Christian Smith, a sociologist from Notre Dame. They were fantastic!
Dr. Bradley and Dr. Smith helped us understand the religious beliefs and practices of the rising generation and helped us understand how we can engage this generation with the gospel.
Dr. Smith describes the de facto religion of this generation as Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. I’d love to unpack that for you, but instead, I have an offer for you.
Go to www.renewconference.org/store and buy any one audio file, and you can receive another one for free! If you want to purchase the whole conference set, you can get that for a discount as well. It’s usually $15, but my readers can get it for $10. (To find out why we’re selling these audio files, click here.)
Here are the coupon codes you should use (and these are only for Anwoth readers!):
Buy one get one free coupon code: ANWOTH2010RENEW
Complete Conference Set discount: ANWOTH3906
Make plans to attend next year’s conference! To keep up to date with news from the Renew Conference, become a fan on Facebook:
C..S. Lewis:
There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of “Heaven” ridiculous by saying they do not want “to spend eternity playing harps.” The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them. All the scriptural imagery (harps, crowns, gold, etc.) is, of course, a merely symbolical attempt to express the inexpressible.
Musical instruments are mentioned because for many people (not all) music is the thing known in the present life which most strongly suggests ecstasy and infinity.
Crowns are mentioned to suggest the fact that those who are united with God in eternity share His splendour and power and joy.
Gold is mentioned to suggest the timelessness of Heaven (gold does not rust) and the preciousness of it.People who take the symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs.
Mere Christianity, book 3, chapter 10 (on “Hope”)
HT: Justin Taylor
Check out this news from HCSB:
Today we are giving away free HCSB iPhone apps! RT and make sure you follow @HCSB to enter to win.
I’ve used the HCSB iPhone app recently and really love it. It’s great to have a translation you like available and accessible like that. I would highly recommend you buy it…that is, if you don’t get a free one!
This Bible includes the BibleReader with the following features:
- Three step Verse Chooser to easily navigate to any verse
- Word search to quickly find any word in the document
In Letters to a Diminished Church, Dorothy Sayers writes this:
The Church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables. Church by all means, and decent forms of amusement, certainly—but what use is all that if in the very center of his life and occupation he is insulting God with bad carpentry?
It is a little unusual for me to post something like this, so let’s just say it falls under the category of “Too good not to share!”
Here’s the story. My wife’s computer is broken, so we’re getting her a new one. She doesn’t do any hefty processing, so she wants a netbook. You know, one of those small, lightweight laptops.
As we looked around for a good (read, “inexpensive”) one, we found that they come with Windows 7 Starter Edition. Yet, when you visit the Windows 7 website and look under “Compare Editions” they only show a comparison of Home Premium, Professional and Ultimate.
What gives?
When you click on “Starter,” however, this what you read:
Did you catch that? “Windows 7 Starter puts less between you and what you want to do–less waiting, less clicking, less hassle connecting to networks.”
So if that’s true, I can only assume the converse is also true: “Buy any upgraded edition of Windows 7 and we guarantee more waiting, more clicking, more hassle connecting to networks.”
I love it!
I also love my Mac!
