I Wrote a Book

So I should probably let you know that I wrote a book. Two, in fact. Here they are:

                      

Here’s how it happened: sometime in the fall of 2007 (I think), I was looking for freelance writing jobs online. Happened across an ad for someone to write biographies of biblical figures. Figured I could do that — turns out, they agreed, and the books were published a couple of months ago.

The two books are part of a series called “Money at Its Best: Millionaires of the Old Testament.” They’re done by an educational publishing company in Pennsylvania called Mason Crest Publishers.  Here’s what their website says about the series:

The purpose of the series Money at its Best: Millionaires of the Bible is to examine the lives of key figures from Biblical history, showing how these people blended their faith in God with their wealth or privileged positions in order to make a difference in the lives of others. Each book in this series weaves stories from the Bible with legends (for) a plausible account of the subject’s life. These portraits are fleshed out by 35 to 60 full-color illustrations, including pictures of or folk tales, other scriptural sources, and modern archaeological research to create artifacts and paintings of religious scenes from Rembrandt, Michaelangelo, and other great artists. Each book includes resources for further study, as well as a detailed index.

The complete series includes 12 books — other figures include Abraham and Sarah, Daniel, David, Esther, Job, Moses, Noah, Sampson and Solomon. They’re aimed at middle school-level readers and higher.

Each book took two or three months to write. Lots of research, lots of late nights, lots of patience from my wife. Learned a ton. Loved being immersed in the lives of God’s chosen people, who weren’t all they were cracked up to be — just like us. Stumbled upon a cool name for my blog (the story can come later). Loved doing it, can’t wait to do it again.

The publishers did a great job making the books look good. Lots of cool design and graphics.

So there ya go. A couple of books with my name on them. Who’d a thunk it? Not that I have any particular ability on my own — as the song says, “Thy mercy, my God, is the theme of my song.”

If you want to see them on a real website to make sure I’m not just pulling your leg, check here and here. They’re also on Amazon — here and here. There’s no danger of them cracking the best seller list. Jacob has no ranking, while Joseph is rocketing up Amazon’s list at #8,059,841.

–End of self-promotion. You may now return to your regularly scheduled programming.–

How to Make Golf Exciting

Since the U.S. Open is in a rain delay, here’s how to make it more exciting on television: put basketball announcers in the broadcast booth. You gotta go watch this — it’s hilarious (sorry, can’t get the embed to work):

How to Make Golf Exciting

Pulitzer Prizes

From today’s Writer’s Almanac:

It was on this day in 1917 that the first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded. Here are some things you might not have known about Pulitzer Prizes:

1. They’re announced each year in April and then awarded at Columbia University in May, during a luncheon at the campus library.
2. Each Pulitzer Prize winner receives a $10,000 award and a certificate, except in the Public Service category, where the winner is given a gold medal. Only a newspaper, not an individual, can receive the Public Service prize for journalism.
3. There are 21 Pulitzer categories. Two-thirds of the prizes (14) revolve around journalism. There are six for letters and drama (fiction, drama, history, biography, poetry, and general nonfiction), and there is one prize given for music.
4. The Pulitzer Prize for fiction used to be called the Pulitzer Prize for the novel. The name was changed in 1948.
5. Poet Robert Frost won the Pulitzer Prize four times. Playwright Eugene O’Neill also won four Pulitzer Prizes.
6. The Pulitzer Prize is a very American award. Only U.S. citizens are eligible for the non-journalism Prizes. The exception to this is in the history category: a non-American can win the Pulitzer Prize if he or she wrote a book about the history of the United States. Foreign journalists can win Pulitzers if they write for a newspaper published in the United States.
7. The New York Times holds the all-time record for number of Pulitzer Prizes received. The paper has collectively won 101 Pulitzers.
8. Newspapers generally nominate themselves for Pulitzer Prizes. The fee for each entry is $50, and the material that the newspaper wants the prize board to consider must be accompanied by an entry form. An entry has to fit into one of the 21 categories; it can’t be submitted on the grounds that it is just generally good. To be eligible, a paper must be published in the U.S. at least weekly.
9. In 2009, for the first time, online-only news organizations were eligible for the Pulitzer. Before, it was restricted to print publications.
10. Decisions about prize winners are made by the Pulitzer board in secret. Afterward, the board does not publicly discuss or defend its decisions.

Sowell on Sotamayor

Thomas Sowell has been writing about the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. He has an incisive way of cutting through the clutter and media spin and making you think about the heart of the issues. A couple of quotes:

It is one of the signs of our times that so many in the media are focusing on the life story of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court of the United States.

You might think that this was some kind of popularity contest, instead of a weighty decision about someone whose impact on the fundamental law of the nation will extend for decades after Barack Obama has come and gone.

Much is being made of the fact that Sonia Sotomayor had to struggle to rise in the world. But stop and think.

If you were going to have open heart surgery, would you want to be operated on by a surgeon who was chosen because he had to struggle to get where he is or by the best surgeon you could find– even if he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and had every advantage that money and social position could offer?

And this:

The clever people in the media and elsewhere are saying that “inevitably” one’s background influences how one feels about issues. Even if that were true, judges are not supposed to decide cases based on their personal feelings.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that he “loathed” many of the people in whose favor he voted on the Supreme Court. Obviously, he had feelings. But he also had the good sense and integrity to rule on the basis of the law, not his feelings.

Laws are made for the benefit of the citizens, not for the self-indulgences of judges. Making excuses for such self-indulgences and calling them “inevitable” is part of the cleverness that has eroded the rule of law and undermined respect for the law …

It would be considered a disgrace if an umpire in a baseball game let his “empathy” determine whether a pitch was called a ball or strike. Surely we should accept nothing less from a judge.

You can read all of his columns here. Highly recommended.

Twitter and Worship

As the popularity of Twitter explodes, people are using it everywhere — including during worship, often with the encouragement of their pastors.

While Twitter is cool (you can follow me here) when used correctly, that doesn’t include during worship. I can’t explain it any better than Josh Harris did, with agreement and expansion from John Piper. From Piper:

… we think you should use Twitter before and after corporate worship to say what you take in and take out. But when you are in corporate worship, Worship! There is a difference between communion with God and commenting on communion with God.

Don’t tweet while having sex. Don’t tweet while praying with the dying. Don’t tweet when your wife is telling you about the kids. There’s a season for everything. Multitasking only makes sense when none of the tasks requires heart-engaged, loving attention.

… let’s pursue God with all our might and focus during corporate worship. Then tell the world what God did. If it’s God’s power, it can wait an hour.

Amen.

Jesus According to Dan Brown

Angels and Demons, in movie theaters now, is the latest movie based on Dan Brown’s books. The first, of course, was The DaVinci Code, which was, to put it mildly, fairly popular.

Angels and Demons is in the same vein as the first book, focusing on a dark secret within the Catholic church that symbologist Robert Langdon desperately tries to uncover as he races through a series of thrilling events. It’s captivating reading, sweeping you up into fascinating history and hidden conspiracies.

It’s also seductively wrong, as Ross Douthat writes in today’s New York Times. He nails the problem with the book and with religion today:

In the Brownian worldview, all religions — even Roman Catholicism — have the potential to be wonderful, so long as we can get over the idea that any one of them might be particularly true. It’s a message perfectly tailored for 21st-century America, where the most important religious trend is neither swelling unbelief nor rising fundamentalism, but the emergence of a generalized “religiousness” detached from the claims of any specific faith tradition.

Yep. Religion is great, as long as it doesn’t have to do with sin and blood and righteousness. The same do-it-yourself mentality that works well on home repairs isn’t so effective when it comes to your eternal fate:

polls … reveal the growth of do-it-yourself spirituality, with traditional religion’s dogmas and moral requirements shorn away. The same trend is at work within organized faiths as well, where both liberal and conservative believers often encounter a God who’s too busy validating their particular version of the American Dream to raise a peep about, say, how much money they’re making or how many times they’ve been married.

Here’s the crux of the issue — a 21st century Jesus who fits neatly into your life, or the Jesus portrayed in the Gospel accounts:

These are Dan Brown’s kind of readers. Piggybacking on the fascination with lost gospels and alternative Christianities, he serves up a Jesus who’s a thoroughly modern sort of messiah — sexy, worldly, and Goddess-worshiping, with a wife and kids, a house in the Galilean suburbs, and no delusions about his own divinity.

But the success of this message — which also shows up in the work of Brown’s many thriller-writing imitators — can’t be separated from its dishonesty. The “secret” history of Christendom that unspools in “The Da Vinci Code” is false from start to finish. The lost gospels are real enough, but they neither confirm the portrait of Christ that Brown is peddling — they’re far, far weirder than that — nor provide a persuasive alternative to the New Testament account.

Money quote:

The Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — jealous, demanding, apocalyptic — may not be congenial to contemporary sensibilities, but he’s the only historically-plausible Jesus there is.

For millions of readers, Brown’s novels have helped smooth over the tension between ancient Christianity and modern American faith. But the tension endures. You can have Jesus or Dan Brown. But you can’t have both.

Moral Hazard

Malcom Gladwell, relating sports, the economy and health insurance:

I think, for example, that the idea of ranking draft picks in reverse order of finish — as much as it sounds “fair” — does untold damage to the game. You simply cannot have a system that rewards anyone, ever, for losing. Economists worry about this all the time, when they talk about “moral hazard.” Moral hazard is the idea that if you insure someone against risk, you will make risky behavior more likely. So if you always bail out the banks when they take absurd risks and do stupid things, they are going to keep on taking absurd risks and doing stupid things. Bailouts create moral hazard. Moral hazard is also why your health insurance has a co-pay. If your insurer paid for everything, the theory goes, it would encourage you to go to the doctor when you really don’t need to. No economist in his right mind would ever endorse the football and basketball drafts the way they are structured now. They are a moral hazard in spades.

 

Fun With Ping Pong Balls

Outstanding use of a college education:

Their parents must be so proud.

Stand by Me

A little fun on Friday — an around-the-world version of Stand by Me, done by street performers and musicians adding their parts as it travels across several continents. Part of the “Playing for Change: Peace Through Music” project. Good stuff. Enjoy.

(It’s cooler if you go full-screen. Click on the little box next to the bottom right corner.)

(You can watch more songs here.)

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The Gospel as a Grant Request

My job involves writing grants that request funding for particular projects. In the grant, you must describe the problem, offer your solution and make your case why you should be given money to enact it.

 

Imagine the absurdity if we came up with the following proposal and submitted it to God. From our perspective, we would have no hope of funding.

 

But that’s the thing — it’s not man’s idea, so we have hope.

 

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The Gospel as a Grant Request

 

Summary: The sin-scarred human race requests salvation from holy God, the creator of the universe. Our sin against you has condemned us; we are requesting that you provide redemption that will restore our relationship with you and allow us to spend eternity in your presence. Our proposal calls for your son, Jesus Christ, to make sacrificial atonement for our sins based on his life, death and resurrection. We believe you will do this because you love us; we believe that you can do this because you are both just and justifier.

 

Profile: There are currently six billion human beings on the planet. Millions more have lived and died since the beginning of time. We are filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness and malice. We embrace envy, murder, strife and deceit. We are gossips and slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty and boastful, sexually immoral, inventors of evil, disobedient, foolish, faithless, heartless and ruthless. The thoughts of our hearts are only evil continually. We are ugly, dirty and twisted with sin. Left to ourselves, we are dead and without hope.

 

Background: You created man after your own image, pure and spotless. Adam and Eve’s sin in the Garden of Eden means that each human being is born depraved, able only to choose according to our sinful wills and destined for eternal death. Because we are made in your image, we can be kind, do good deeds and love our fellow man. But these things do not save us. You are the only means by which we will find any rest for our restless souls.

 

Need: Our greatest and only need is redemption. We need to be saved from death and raised to life. We need our sin to be taken away and our punishment to be absorbed by another. We need to be born again, declared righteous in the court of heaven and adopted into the family of God. We need all of this on your initiative. And we need it to last for eternity. Without it, we will suffer in hell forever.

 

Project Description: Send Jesus Christ, your only son, to this world to be miraculously born of a virgin, live a life perfect in every respect, and die an unjust death, taking upon himself the sins of his people and satisfying the full cup of the wrath of God. Raise him from the dead three days later, proving your victory over death. On the basis of Christ’s finished work, call us to yourself, regenerate our hearts and enable us to trust in you by grace alone through faith alone. Replace our guilt with Christ’s righteousness, adopt us into your family and send the Holy Spirit to dwell within us.

 

Help us to live according to your word and for your glory. Provide local communities of believers that will assemble together to know you and make you known. Enable us to persevere in your grace until you draw our souls to your physical presence to worship you. In the last day, return to judge the wicked and restore the new heavens and the new earth. Let us forever praise you with your people from every tribe and tongue and nation.

 

Budget: We are morally bankrupt. All our righteousness – any good thing we do – is as filthy rags in your sight. We can contribute nothing. You must provide everything. There are no other donors, no other possible sources of salvation. This proposal rests entirely with you.

 

Conclusion: We are desperate sinners absurdly requesting salvation from the very one against whom we have sinned. We have no prior relationship, no basis for our request other than your good pleasure and the praise of your glorious grace. We cast ourselves on you as we wait for the grace by which alone we can stand.

 

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