Well isn’t that nice. Columbus’ initial impulse upon encountering the indigenous other was to think, “Hey, these people would make good slaves!” Columbus was barely off the boat before the native inhabitants were being captured and sold into slavery. Columbus wrote, “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.” Apparently Columbus was a religious man…proposing slave trade in the name of the Trinity!
Since when does your relationship with God depend on your rights as a human being? In the book of Daniel, when Darius made a law prohibiting prayer to any deities for a month, Daniel went back to his house and prayed anyway.
And then he went to a lion’s den.
And when Darius came back to get him the next morning, the first thing that Daniel said to him wasn’t, “Give me back my rights, jerk!” It was, “Oh king, may you live forever.”
To the guy who threw him into a lion’s den for praying.
The Lost Art of the Church Potluck
With our friends we floated two hypotheses about the decline of the potluck.
The first was church size. It seems that churches are either very big or very small, making it harder to achieve the sweet spot for a congregation-wide potluck.
Our other hypothesis was about a loss of generational skill. The consensus was that our mothers and grandmothers really knew how to do a potluck. And the main thing was that they brought to the potluck a ton of food, enough for their family and many, many more.
Daily Fantasy Sports: It’s All Fun and Games Until Someone Gets Hurt
Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS) take the same principles of traditional fantasy sports–entrants choose players from different teams and receive points based on their performances–and monetizes them. Entrants pay to enter leagues, which last one week’s worth of games, with the hopes of winning large sums of cash. One pays into the system in hopes that his team wins him a lot of money.
Clearly this is a gambling model. While there are some who argue otherwise–only so they can keep it legal–it meets the basic criteria of gambling. No matter how much knowledge of the sport or research about match-ups an entrant possesses, his or her players are still at the mercy of chance. Sure, Julio Jones may be a great match-up against the Texans’ defense, but his owners didn’t plan on Atlanta jumping out to such a big lead that it would keep him from playing in much of the game, thus limiting his points. Because you can, and almost certainly will, lose money with the hopes of winning money, DFS are gambling, and gambling hurts its participants.
5 Warning Signs for the Church in a ‘Facebook Culture’
What effect does “social media” technology have on the way we view the church? On the way we conceive of life in Christ’s body? Much of social media is positive, of course. And the church has certainly leveraged this technology to advance the cause of Christ. Moreover, I can’t miss the irony of writing about the adverse effects of technology on a website. Nevertheless, I do have some concerns—and so should you.
Germany Faces Few Mass Shootings Amid Tough Gun Laws
Crimes involving guns are still relatively rare. German government statistics showed that while criminal acts increased last year to just over six million in a country of 80.6 million people, crimes that violated weapons laws declined to 30,785 cases, or by 2.1 percent, from 2013.
There was a slight decrease in violent crimes last year in the United States as well, and the rate of gun-related homicides declined to 3.6 per 100,000 people by 2010 from 6.6 per 100,000 in 1981. But the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit group that keeps track of gun violence, tallied more than 40,000 acts of violence involving guns so far this year.
Intentionally, this has been a rant. Some points can be made better in a bombastic way than in a nuanced way, and regular readers will hopefully know my huge esteem for the enormous gifts God has given us in people like Stuart Townend, Chris Tomlin, Darlene Zschech, Matt Redman, Tim Hughes, Kari Jobe, Martin Smith, Bob Kauflin and many others. But in amongst the generalisations, there may be some helpful challenges for some of us, especially for those whose commission it is to shepherd the church.
First edition of King James Bible from 1611 found in church cupboard
A vicar clearing out a cupboard at his church found a forgotten first edition King James Bible dating back to 1611.
There are believed to be fewer than 200 such Bibles still in existence.
Crew shooting film to promote Houston robbed at ‘We Love Houston’ sign
Zach Jankovic, a Houston native and owner of the production company, said his crew was shooting footage of the “We Love Houston” sign for a film to promote the positive aspects of the city when a man approached them and brandished a gun.
The man fled with two video cameras being used by the crew and a GoPro they were using to shoot behind-the-scenes footage.