Friday in the wild

It's Friday, so once again I present a compendium of interesting posts from around the blogosphere that I have encountered in the last week.

bLogicus reports on a Boston-area abortionist who freely admits that what she is doing is taking life. "I have the utmost respect for life," says the doctor (name withheld). Just not these lives, she doesn't add. [Read Abortionist Confesses 'Yes, I End Life']

Adrian Warnock, who recently came right out and said Emergent Church personalities are neo-liberals , by which he means "the intentional adaptation of Christianity to post-modernity," has put together a news aggregator comprising blogs that discuss the Emergent movement from both sides.

Russ at the Coffeehouse at the End-Of-Days calls nonbelievers to read the Bible, wondering why we Christians would rather have them start off with Mere Christianity or something:

I confess to my own shame that I am sometimes hesitant to turn non-Christians loose on the Bible lest they reject it and the Lord. If that isn't perverse, what is? Do I seriously imagine that books of lesser spiritual value (that is, all other books) will do a better job of penetrating the human heart than the very book that God gave to do that very thing? Do I think of the Bible as something a person "works up to" after they have developed a taste for religious things?

[Read Calling Non-Christians To Read]

Whenever I get around to it, one of these days I want to write my own essay with the working title, "Why you should study doctrine." In the meantime, however, Michael's thoughts over at Christian Conservative capture a few of my own sentiments:

What is doctrine? It’s a body of unchanging and specific principles. The Bible is specific in identifying God, the fall, sin, the law, salvation, and Christ. The Bible isn’t a nebulous book that speaks in secret code leaving every truth up to individual interpretation, as much as those who pollute its message would say in their own defense. Therefore we should understand these specifics, specifically. And that’s exactly what I’ve been doing these last few years: getting to know my religion, the fruit of which is the excitement I now have for this truth as an older man.

[Read Doctrine Matters]

He's also distilled a few of the historic Protestant confessions into basic but readable PDF files.

My friend Rand found a local Baptist church missing the point:

On the Lord's Day, in place of an evening service where God's people could be praising and worshiping the Lord, this 'church' presented a violent, stupid Hollywood movie. And this promise of dialogue, assuming it is somekind of Gospel presentation, still doesn't legitimize this nonsense.

[Read This Kind of Thing Drives Me Nuts!!!]

And he's right. I like the idea of watching thought-provoking movies and following them up with critical discussion, but that's something I would do at home and by invitation. The church is for the worship of God and the training of the saints, and as I've said before, any church that ignores this duty is missing its mandate.

Kids these days. "Shrode" over at Thinklings Weblog posted an intriguing article about a pastor-stumper from one of the rug-rats:

I love children. And I love their questions. And last night one stumped me. In the children's Bible study, they were studying the second great commandment, 'Love your neighbor as yourself'. This child asked her teacher, 'Does that mean we have to love Satan too?' The teacher said, 'Let's ask the Pastor'. When they came to me with the question after Bible study, I had to admit that I didn't know, but that I'd work on it."

[Read Do We Have To Love Satan?]

Actually, I've been trying to think about how I would answer that question, too. Well, it's good fodder for a future post.

Looking through my referrer links, I got hit with an interesting Google query this week, on yeastless factuality. It's interesting not because it's bizarre, but because it wasn't one that would have occurred to me. Obviously someone was looking for information related to The Life of Pi, and hit my review. What surprised me, looking through the hits, was how many hits were related to sermons and homiletics, some of them making use of Martel's phrase pretty well, others not. Obviously this novel has resonated with a lot of clergy, though as its theme is the dividing line between faith and skepticism, I guess that shouldn't surprise me.

In other search news, as of today this site ranks #4 on Google for the basic search "crusty." We're movin' on up . . .

Postscript: One more. It was posted this week, so it counts. From Varifrank comes this hilarious-but-pointed story about some Eurotrash IT workers getting what-for:

Today, during an afternoon conference that wrapped up my project of the last 18 months, one of my Euro collegues tossed this little turd out to no one in particular:

"See, this is why George Bush is so dumb, theres a disaster in the world and he sends an Aircraft Carrier..."

After which he and many of my Euro collegues laughed out loud.

and then they looked at me. I wasn't laughing, and neither was my Hindi friend sitting next to me, who has lost family in the disaster.

I'm afraid I was "unprofessional", I let it loose . . .

Only you'll have to go view the rest for yourself. (Hat tip to Brutally Honest.)