Here to Make Friends?

Found this video on ThinkChristian. IIt's demonstrates a common cliche in reality tv: the "I ain't here to make friends".










What it makes wonder though is whether this isn't just a reality TV thing. One of the girls above says that she already has enough friends and doesn't need anymore. I wonder if there are times when I'm just civil to people but deliberately avoid anything deeper then an acquaintance. If I am, which I'm sure I am in at least some situations, how am I missing out?

100 Books.

My friend Sheggi posted this list in her blog. So I'm taking the challenge."The Big Read was a 2003 survey carried out by the BBC, with the goal of finding the “Nation’s Best-loved Book” by way of a viewer vote via the Web, SMS, and telephone.

The Big Read figures that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books. How do you stack up?
 How to Play:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Phillip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Read a bit but far from all)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (Have yet to finish it)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (started, didn't finish, I will one day)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (isn't this covered in 33)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (started but yet to finish)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol- Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom 
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams 
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (read almost all his other books, but only seen the movie of this one)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
 ....................................................
I'm 9 out of 100. How about you?

Bradley Hathaway

A while ago, I came upon this guy on the X3Church podcast.

He's a Christian poet or spoken word artist and his work is beautiful.
Look him up on Youtube and Myspace to hear some more: Bradley Hathaway
I'm planning on ordering some of stuff on Amazon once I get a 3V (online purchasing) card sorted.







Why I'm Not Emergent (by a guy who should be)



I have a big passion for being involved in anything new or revolutionary. My lifelong goal is be some one who starts ministries, spread ideas and makes people think in a constructive way. With this composure, I was naturally drawn to one such new and revolutionary movement in the Christian body.



This was a movement which like the puritans, of times past, seemed to desire to strip Christianity to the bare bones; to ask the question, "is the way we do church really the only or even the best way?". It engaged with culture actively and produced books and video resource which didn't smack of the typical Christian cheesiness.



I entered this world through the eyes of hip, bespectabled pastor, Rob Bell and his book, Velvet Elvis. Rob, the cool geek, used interesting metaphors and introduced new information from rabbinic teachings which made him sound smart (and me sound smart when I quoted him). He offered a simple reading of the scriptures with an air of enthusiasm and hope: we can make this world better.



Next came the videos, a library of not just one, not just a few, but an ever growing library of short teachings which could serve as discussion starters or just get one thinking. They looked brilliant. (I for one love the cute voice that says "noo-ma" at the beginning.)They were shorter then the usual 50min sermon at only 9-15 minutes (although they didn't hold my attention for the whole time, I remembered tidbits). Each one handled a topic and while not quite answering the questions, they inspired you to think and consider a possibility. They were a wonderful half-way house between Jesus, Dr. Phil and the social-networking generation.



I got more and more engrossed in the revolution through podcasts of Mr.Bell and Mr. McManus (Erwin Raphael). I loved the little gems of inspiration and scriptural self-help. I loved the rabbinic trivia and the "you thought it meant this, but it really means this" moments. I did for a while anyway.



All this time, I'd had to quiet the voice that noticed the illogicalness and borderline heresies and just tell myself that "that's OK, remember it's only a spring, not a wall; I'm sure the rest of his stuff is still good". Ironically, it was around the time that I saw Rob Bell live and even shook his hands that the mental house of cards fell for me. I did some research, read some stuff, reread some stuff, thought about stuff and finally saw that I just didn't need this revolution, which is generally know as the emerging or emergent church. I wish it could define more but it's after midnight and it's hard enough to explain even when I'm fully awake.



This week I've been reading this book.





It's one of the best books available on the movement and unlike similar books (such as the one by D.A. Carson) it's by a couple of guys who fit the typical demographic of a emergent pastor). It's very good and much more balanced then the title may suggest.




My next post will be related to this one and be about what I feel is negotiable in Christianity and what isn't. I'm much too tired to write that now.