Today's links 24/1/2010

1. Slam poet Taylor Mali’s “Totally Like Whatever, You Know?”

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

(HT: Justin Taylor)


2. How a Reformed Church Overthrew Communism in Romania....the truth is stranger than fiction


3. The results of a study that has concluded that "children spanked up to the age of 6 were likely as teenagers to perform better at school and were more likely to carry out volunteer work and to want to go to college than their peers who had never been physically disciplined, whereas children who continued to be spanked into adolescence showed clear behavioral problems."


4. Home-Schooled Children Excel as Adults: Another study that found that "home-educated adults in this study were very positive about having been homeschooled and toward homeschooling in general, actively engaged in their local communities, keeping abreast of current affairs, highly civically involved, tolerant of others expressing their viewpoints, attaining relatively high levels of formal education, religiously active and wide-ranging in their worldview beliefs, holding worldview beliefs similar to those of their parents, and largely home educating their own children."

(HT: Veith)


5. The Scary Idea of unmerited free grace - A nice quote from Tim Keller's book: The Prodigal God

"Some years ago I met a woman who began coming to Redeemer, the church where I am a minister. She said that she had gone to church growing up and she had always heard that God accepts us only if we are sufficiently good and ethical. She had never heard the message she was now hearing, that we can be accepted by God by sheer grace through the work of Christ regardless of anything we do or have done. She said, 'That's a scary idea! Oh, it's a good scary, but still scary.'

I was intrigued. I asked her what was so scary about unmerited free grace? She replied something like this: 'If I was saved by my good works - then there would be a limit to what God could ask of me or put me through. I would be like a taxpayer with rights. I would have done my duty and now I would deserve a certain quality of life. But if it is really true that I am a sinner saved by sheer grace - at God's infinite cost - then there's nothing He cannot ask of me.'

She could see immediately that the wonderful-beyond-belief teaching of salvation by sheer grace had two edges to it. On the one hand it cut away slavish fear. God loves us freely, despite our flaws and failures. Yet, she also knew that if Jesus really had done this for her - she was not her own. She was bought with a price."

(HT: Vitamin Z)

6. The Results Fit the Expectations: The story of Passion 2010, a conference in Atlanta, and what happened when 20,000 young people were presented with a big challenge. Do go over to the link, and read through. Maybe, as the point was made, we are not expecting enough from our young people and children.

7. A hilarious video on Moms.



(HT: Pramod)