March Reading List

13. Forced Out (ua), by Stephen Frey
14. Babylon 5: The Wheel of Fire (pb), by Jane Killick
15. New Moon (ua), by Stephenie Meyer
16. The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy (ua), by Pietra Rivola
17. The Next Christendom (hc), by Philip Jenkins

Podcast Review

The Internet Monk Podcast

I have been listening to Michael Spencer's podcast for more than a year, so his "coming evangelical collapse" piece in the March 10 Christian Science Monitor did not surprise me. In both his blog and podcast, Spencer has been sounding this clarion call some time now. His podcast comes out approximately weekly, runs about 30 minutes, and features Spencer's observations on culture, politics, society, and the church.

I found myself in the "post-evangelical wilderness" for more than a decade before I found Spencer's terminology. His path and mine are similar, and I find his insights wortthwhile, and unavailable in other forums.

N.T. Wright on the Bible

It’s a big book, full of big stories with big characters. They have big ideas (not the least of which about themselves) and make big mistakes. It’s about God, and greed, and grace; about life, lust, laughter, and loneliness. It’s about birth, beginnings, and betrayals; about siblings, squabbles, and sex; about power and prayer and prison and passion.

And that’s just Genesis.

Bert Waggoner on the Trinity

First, we must grow in our relationship with the triune God -- Father, Son & Holy Spirit. The relationship with God is a relationship with all three members of the holy Trinity. Sometimes there can be a problem in spiritual development due to all the focus being on one member of the Trinity -- e.g. within Evangelicalism, the Son; within the Pentecostal/Charismatic context, the Holy Spirit; or within historical Protestantism, the Father. Our growth in relationship with God must be with the Father, and with the Son, and with the Spirit. Our growth takes place in the dynamic of love that exists in this divine community.

Sts. Perpetua & Felicity

Among the most powerful stories of the early church is that of Perpetua & Felicity, whose martyrdom around the year 200 the church remembers today. My favorite part is when Perpetua tries to explain her choice to face death to her father.
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"Do you see this vessel—a waterpot or whatever name it may have? Can it be called by any other name than what it is? So also I cannot call myself by any other name than what I am—a Christian.” So wrote Perpetua, a beautiful, well-educated, noblewoman of Carthage, mother of an infant son and chronicler of the Emperor Septimius Severus' persecution of the church.

Despite death threats, Perpetua and Felicity (a slavewoman and expectant mother), and others, refused to renounce their Christian faith. For this, they were imprisoned, and sentenced to death in the public games in the amphitheater.

Perpetua’s mother was a Christian and her father a pagan. He continually pleaded with her to deny her faith. Not willing to renounce Christianity, she comforted her father in his grief over her decision. “It shall happen as God shall choose, for assuredly I depend not on my own power but on the power of God.“

As part of the games, Perpetua and Felicity were beheaded. Felicity gave birth to her girl a few days before her death.