I should probabally come up with a catchier title than this, but for now this is what you get…

David looks at the whole death/sin canard as a “proof” for YEC :

Morris, as he worded his argument, is missing the clear teaching of Rom 5:12: Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned, namely that Paul is talking about the human species. Death came to man because of the sin of our representative, and death is defeated, for man, because of the work of another representative. That this applies only to mankind is evident from the fact that sin, in general, did not come into the world through Adam; it was already present thank-you-very-much in the person of Satan and his minions. (read more)

Communio Sanctoum takes a fresh look at O’Connor’s “Christ Hauntedness” :

Kierkegaard spoke often, if shrilly, of the need to recapture Christianity for Christendom. Such is the case today. “We in the South may be in the process of exorcising this ghost which has given us our vision of perfection,” wrote Flannery O’Connor. Good. Let us exorcise the ghost of the phantom Christ that comes to us on the last whispering remnants of the almost-completely-gone culture of the Bible Belt and renew ourselves in the concrete reality of nails, wood, bread, wine, flesh and blood: “the blunt assertion” of fact. “The Christ of faith over the Christ of history,” the neo-orthodox used to say, as if the a-historical phantom of a God was enough. It is not. (read more)

Kyle examines how “community” is missed when we view the church as an enabler towards personal holiness :

Most western Christians seem to think that their purpose in life, once they are part of the church, is to improve in Christian maturity and holiness until they die. Thus you get sayings like, “this life is just a practice run,” or “this life is just preparation for the next.” With this understanding, the purpose of the church is to help us, as individuals, grow in our Christian walk. The purpose of everything is my personal testimony when I die and go to heaven.

I’m coming around to the position that this is entirely backwards from what Christ intended. As I said in my last sermon, building yourself up at the expense of the rest of the church is precisely what God wants us to avoid. God is simply not as much of an individualist as we are. What he wants from us, I believe, is to form a community, the church, which, as a group represents God’s ideal for the human race. (read more)

Michael talks about Mark Heard and what it means to be a “real” Christian :

I don’t smile all the time. I don’t want to. I have darker moods and I feel the pain around me in ways I seldom show. Life with Christ is rich, deep and good, but it’s not always happy, and I’m not always happy. Sometimes God troubles me, and sometimes believing in God is harder than giving up. I think. I get inside myself. I don’t want to be entertained all the time. I want the smiles to count, and not be manufactured. (read more)