Forgiveness in An Unforgiving Age and Four Other Things I Read this Week
Alan Jacobs on internet justice, a missionary who should be remembered, spiritual disciplines for busy moms and other stuff that caught my eye.
Good morning the day after Mother’s Day. Yesterday I preached a sermon from 1 Thessalonians 2 on the mothering qualities Paul urges Christians to emulate in relationships with other Christians. We celebrated my wife and my mother and remembered my late mother-in-law.
I caught and listened to a few things last week that caught my eye that perhaps might be interesting to you.
Spiritual Disciplines for Busy Moms. This podcast from TGC with Jackie Hill Perry, Melissa Kruger, and Jasmine Holmes was helpful for young moms who desire intentional growth but find they have little margin in all of their labors.
Moralism and Unforgiveness in 2021. I was gonna quote part of this from the always brilliant Alan Jacobs, but I decided to just post the whole thing:
When a society rejects the Christian account of who we are, it doesn’t become less moralistic but far more so, because it retains an inchoate sense of justice but has no means of offering and receiving forgiveness. The great moral crisis of our time is not, as many of my fellow Christians believe, sexual licentiousness, but rather vindictiveness. Social media serve as crack for moralists: there’s no high like the high you get from punishing malefactors. But like every addiction, this one suffers from the inexorable law of diminishing returns. The mania for punishment will therefore get worse before it gets better.
Southern Baptist Church helps pay off medical debt. I know good content about evangelicals is not popular on the interwebs these days, but this is a cool story out of Waco about an SBC church that paid of the medical debt of some folks in their community.
Remembering a missionary. I don’t have much to say about this other than to thank God for faithful servants like Jim Flora:
Back to Normal. This was an interesting story by Emma Green at the Atlantic about science denial and the difficulty some are adjusting to life back to normal post COVID. I thought this line was interesting:
For many people, this kind of behavior is a form of good citizenship. That’s a hard idea to give up.
Bonus: I’m reading this fantastic novel by Lisa Scottoline, Eternal. It’s set in Italy in WWI. She does a good job describing the increasingly horrific impact of Italy’s “race laws” that first marginalized, then ghettoized, and eventually tried to exterminate the Jewish people of Italy.
Bonus 2: I’m also listening to this history of WWI, A World Undone. The narrator is really good and the prose is readable and interesting.
As always, if you are interested in my latest books, you can order here:
The Characters of Christmas
The Characters of Easter
A Way With Words
The Dignity Revolution
Lastly, my podcast this week is with my friend Brett McCracken, the author of a new book, The Wisdom Pyramid. Brett has developed a very helpful grid by which he encourages Christians to consumed content, starting with Scripture, then the church and making our way up to books, etc, with the Internet/social media on top. He had some very interesting things to say about the way we are formed by our digital devices.