- The conversion story of a lesbian English professor, from Christianity today. It demonstrates to power of genuine relationships in evangelism.
- What’s wrong with Tasmania, really? Jonathan West says:
Ultimately, Tasmania doesn’t change because its people actually don’t really want to. They don’t need to change because their way of life is financed by the mainland. Far from helping overcome this pattern, the nation’s resource-boom prosperity is enabling and cementing Tasmania’s under-achievement…. It is important to understand what it is about Tasmanian culture and society that permits such an abrogation of responsibility, a refusal to confront reality. Only a minority of Tasmanian households derive their income from participation in the private sector, and few indeed are dependent on the portion of the private sector traded out of the state. The 2011 census revealed that over a third of Tasmanian households derived their sole or primary source of income from a Commonwealth government payment almost another third of the Tasmanian economy was made up of public services (health, education, welfare, administration, policing) and government business enterprises. On top of this, it is estimated that up to 10% work for a private corporation whose sole client is government: road construction, building maintenance, or outsourced government services in the welfare sector. These numbers suggest that as little as a quarter to a third of Tasmanian households derive their livelihood from the genuine private sector.
I’m interested to read the other articles in this series about what is ‘wrong’ with Tasmania. - How do you ‘Do community’ when you church members are geographically dispersed? Tim Chester gives three ideas:
- Join or plant local churches
- Move closer to one another
- Jump in the car
This has been sitting in my ‘starred items’ of Google Reader since October. Ira Glass from the wonderful podcast ‘This American Life’ talking about his interest in Christianity, how Christians are caricatured in the media… and how the Christians he actually knows (even the fundamentalists) are far more nice and thoughtful:
Thanks to Nathan for the link.
I’ve been married to Aileen for more than fourteen years now. In that time she has been loving and loyal and kind and everything else a husband could desire in a wife. She has borne me three children, supported me through career changes, tolerated my sin, prayed me through difficulty, helped me be a man whose church can call him to be their pastor. And yet in a moment, in the blink of an eye, when she in some way displeases me, I can act as if she has never loved me at all, as if she has only ever treated me with contempt. In a moment I can throw out all those years of love and sacrifice and assume that she is now opposed to me, looking out for her interests instead of mine, interested in harming me rather than helping me. In a moment I throw away all these evidences of her love and behave as if she hates me.
via Blog - Christian Reflections http://thegenevapush.com/blogs/xian_reflections/mirrors-22nd-february-2013 (NB: to comment go to thegenevapush.com/xian_reflections)
