Faith: September 2005 Archives

Via Christian Persecution blog, an account of a young Afghani whose parents were Muslim converts to Catholicism. They kept their faith quiet and deliberately avoided using the term "Christian". His father was killed for his faith. It wasn't until he arrived as a refugee in Italy that the young man understood how his family had been different from the neighbors.

I feel I'm somewhat derelict in my duties as a blogger just to throw up a few links and say go read them. I ought to at least provide some witty or enlightening commentary, but I'm too tired, and at least, by posting the link, I'm saying that something is worth reading. So read it, OK?

• Manasclerk has learned a lot of lessons in two-and-a-half years -- about faith, leadership, job size, object oriented programming, software risk management, and organizational design. A selection of 30 months of blog wisdom in summary form:

  Although bigger people can do bigger jobs (larger work), there is a point where you are too big to be useful doing anything that makes money.

  Moses would never have led the Jews out of Egypt had he not ruined his career by killing the Egyptian.

  If you don't have money, prestige and power, you are unlikely to be able to do anything to change the world.

  If you have either money, prestige or power, you're highly unlikely to change the world.

  You really can keep going even when you have no hope of ever having hope.
  

  (I think I kind of understand what he means about modes and trajectories and "size", but I'd like to understand it better.)

• Joel, a Catholic blogger, has written an entry about five fallacies he sees in the way Protestants talk about Catholicism. David Bayly, a pastor in the Presbyterian Church in America, has posted a response, and the discussion -- respectful but direct -- continues in the comments on Baylyblog. (For some reason I'm now getting a 403 error when I try to access Joel's blog, but perhaps the problem will be fixed soon.)

• Michael Spencer is tired of weird Christians: "...'normal' Christian experience is increasingly seen as 'bad' or 'abnormal,' while weirdness is increasingly seen as 'normal' and proof that a person is really 'spiritual.'"

  UPDATED 2020/01/02 to replace dead links with Internet Archive links.