I once asked a sound engineer how loud the volume can get before it damages your hearing. He gave me an answer I did not expect. He answered with a question: For how long? For how long? I had never considered time to be a factor, but it is. Damaging your hearing is a matter of decibel level and length of exposure. Volume plus time. What does this have to do with … [Read more...] about For How Long
Articles
The Key to Good Style
I have so enjoyed Steven Pinker's The Sense of Style. If you are writing books or sermons, blogs or lesson plans, you will greatly benefit from his thoughts on good communication. One particularly poignant section captures the secret to good style in a simple metaphor. Pinker writes: The guiding metaphor of classic style is seeing the world. The writer can see … [Read more...] about The Key to Good Style
One More Reason to Trust the Bible
James Loewen (2007) has written an interesting book on American history, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. As the title intimates, this is a book about the errors and omissions of our history textbooks. One observation Loewen makes about our curriculum strikes me in particular. Loewen complains American history textbooks tend to … [Read more...] about One More Reason to Trust the Bible
The Glory of Every Person
In his essay "The Weight of Glory," C.S. Lewis considers the echoes of eternity found in every person. Occasionally, we encounter the "scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited" (Lewis, 2001, p. 31). Lewis suggests these faint echoes and deep longings reveal our true nature and destiny, that we were … [Read more...] about The Glory of Every Person
The Discipline of Retreat
This weekend the students at our church participate in our annual fall retreat. It is easy to think of a fall retreat as an event. But we try to think of our fall retreat as a spiritual discipline. M. Robert Mulholland Jr. (1993) describes retreat in these terms: Retreat is the discipline of setting apart a time, individually or corporately, to step aside from the … [Read more...] about The Discipline of Retreat