my burg

1) "The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past. He cares as little for what will be as for what has been; he cares only for what ought to be.”   Happy birthday, G. K. Chesterton ! 2)  Israeli archaeologists have unearthed a 2,700-year-old clay seal with the name of Bethlehem, showing that the town existed  centuries before it was revered as Jesus' birthplace. 3) Ben Witherington Jr. on "the growing suspicion that William Harris, the guru on levels of literacy in the ancient world (no more  than 10-20%) was wrong, indeed badly wrong if we take into account all different sorts of literacies..." 4)  Too catholic to be Catholic .  Peter Leithart on why his catholicity leads him to be a Protestant. 5) "...this is a generation mired in fake love and fake war, and that is danger...

I was moved by what I read below -- especially the last paragraph -- taken from a message entitled " The Glory of the Gospel Ministry," by Norman A. Madson.  It was d elivered at the 1950 Convention of the Norwegian Synod of the American Evangelical Lutheran Church... In his novel Kristus for Pilatus ( Christ before Pilate ), Waldemar Agar tells of an aged pastor who has given his all in a faithful ministry, but who, as the work becomes too strenuous for his advanced age, and the many new demands which a new age has brought with it make it imperative that he retire, stands before a picture of the thorn-crowned Man from Nazareth, whom the unjust Roman judge is about to send to the cross, and these are the thoughts which crowd in upon him: There is the “kingdom within you” in its highest potential. An independent kingdom, -- an incomprehensible kingdom, whose defeats are victories, whose mightiest representatives are they who are trampled in the dust, whose most powerful...

Francis Schaeffer writes the following in a personal letter to Kristina, a woman who had experienced years of chronic depression. She had suffered much personal isolation and had lost the comforting sense of the reality of God.   This excerpt strikes me as having a gospel-centered approach in counseling, in that it fully recognizes the effects of the fall (in all of us) and of the reality of grace and hope through Christ.  (The highlights below have been added by me.) "I understand too what you write about the difficulty of finding a consolation and reality.  I think there are really two  things to see:  first, that when a person goes through the kind of difficulty you have gone through, this kind of feeling  is not to be unexpected; and secondly, all men since the Fall-- although in a far lesser degree and a far lesser agony  than you have known-- also have some such problems.   "Increasingly I am so aware that just as there are no perfe...