More Wonderings & Wanderings

I sent my friend a link to an article on Salon.com. And then I sent her another one, "because it appears today I'm trolling around Salon." She said, "it's fun to see what blog or site you get caught up in by the flurry of "read this!" links posted in various places."

In case I wasn't all up in YOUR feed, here are some things I've enjoyed. 

• Mark Driscoll and the conversation about him are hardly strangers to polar opinions. The promotion of his new book stirred the usual hornet's nests. Christianity and Pop Culture and an interesting comment on it all, though: 
• "We don’t need another post on Mark Driscoll, either for or against. We don’t need to talk about the moral implications of giving away prizes for favorable book reviews, or about detractors that are cruel in their critiques. What we need to talk about are the ways we as Christians need to get off the merry-go-round of vitriol in dialogue, of responding to every mini- and mega-theology debate that appears on our Twitter and Facebook feeds. There is quite enough of this going on." The poor guy then had to actually ask that people who tried to win his ipad giveaway please read the book first.
  
• By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature.  Rosie Schapp, author of Drinking with Men, reflects on her relationship with William Blake: 
• "But in a quietly perceptible way, my experience of grief shifted, as though the passage told me to live in that grief as long as I might need, that—through memories, through love, through the very impulse to grieve—it was entwined with joy; that stitched somewhere in my sadness—which seemed insurmountable—was a thread of happiness. This time, Blake did not save my life. Instead, he lit a little votive in the small, dark chapel of loss, by whose light I started to see a way through."
  
• when we need women behind the pulpits -
    Preston Yancey blogs about women's voice in church. I have been really struggling with my place in the church and our church lately, discouraged by the unchallenged status quo of microphones for men only. I'm not demanding a microphone, but I am weary of never hearing a voice that sounds like mine. I loved this line:  "I forget that it still seems strange for some to say that what should be at issue is calling not gender and that the Holy Ghost is awfully fond of surprising us and overturning our paradigms."

And the Salon articles that started the morning's wanderings,

• When modems used to hiss
  Google Internet Cache—the Roman ruins of the 21st Century. Jacob Savage waxes nostalgic about coming of age the same time the internet did.
• The baker’s lament ; As a pastry chef, I watched my artwork vanish in seconds. But its ephemerality was also what made it beautiful.