I really don't have much to add here - it's been a long time since I really seriously went through the mag, and hacking around the site doesn't provide any immediate link to the album reviews I devoured in my Christian youth - I had to seriously dig to find what appears to be an original review of Amy Grant's Age To Age, and said digging led me to a list - with no annotation - of 25 Christian Albums You Need To Own From The 80's that seems pretty spot-on.

But this site's blogroll cannot continue one more day without a link to the Rolling Stone of American Christendom.

Besides, this allows me to engage in one of our favorite habits in the late 80's and early 90's, and that is "If You Like Rolling Stone, You Should Read CCM Magazine."

Such deep longing for God... Repulsed, empty, no faith, no love, no zeal... What do I labor for? If there be no God, there can be no soul. If there be no soul then, Jesus, You also are not true.

Can you name the source of this quote? Care to take a guess? I know I was startled -- no fair checking the URL first.

A friend pointed me to a fascinating article in The New Republic profiling a handful of recent converts to the Orthodox Church. Not little-o orthodox, but Big-O Orthodox. You know, the ones that trace their doctrinal decisions and their lines of leadership back to the original apostles?

It's interesting in part because the principal subjects of the article live in Wheaton, IL -- the Rome of the Evangelical world, home do innumerable Christian colleges and publishers and organizations and churches. (Oh, man, the churches. Through the 80s, Wheaton was effectively a dry town -- I believe one, perhaps two businesses in the entire city were allowed liquor licenses, and grocery stores were SOL. Instead of bars, there were large swaths of Wheaton that had two, even three churches on a single street. But I digress.)

ReligionWriter takes an example from economist Tyler Cowen's new book and applies it to attending religious services. Tyler approves.

The corollary example acknowledges that religious services can be extremely boring. In my experience, this is often an unspoken fact among attendees. No one likes admitting to making mental lists during church for fear of looking less than holy. Of course, if we were to embrace the idea that church is often boring, then we could do something to fix it. The economic lesson is to create self-incentives for yourself to encourage paying attention. This involves moving past the guilt that you need an incentive to pay attention and coming to grips with your inner economist.

I honestly wonder if it's fair to call me an "ex-pat" of Christian culture. But I know it's fair to say I'm not in it.

I'm looking at a church-attending schedule consisting of attending a smallish United Methodist church on Sunday mornings, and a new non-denominational church-plant a county over on Sunday evenings. I feel embraced by the Methodist church, but I don't entirely fit in, the denomination is slowly but surely aging and dying, and I don't feel totally invested in it. I yearn and hunger for the spiritual reality I see among the people engaging in the plant, but that depth of feeling isn't there.

And honestly, I've just told you the story of my walk with Christ.

Crossposted from my personal blog. This, in review, is perfect fodder for our little project here.

Here's my moment of oh-dear-God-I'm-getting-OLD of the day:

Fifteen years ago, Cornerstone Magazine published an expose' on "Christian comedian" Mike Warnke.

That very possibly is not a big deal to you. It's huge to me. As Davan MacIntire puts it (in a comic that I identify way too much with), "I didn't have a lot of options when it came to entertainment during my 'I Love Jesus So Much I Annoy My Christian Parents' stage. It was basically Warnke or Carman, and Warnke was the one who didn't sell $150 tour jackets."

I've been a bit quiet for the past day or two, in part because I'm crunching on some work related deadlines and preparing for a weekend trip to LA for some training workshops. Some subtle new additions have been made to Growing Up Goddy in the background, though, so I'll point 'em out!

First, contributors can create blog posts, reviews of books and movies, and links to other sites. Links are automatically filed under the 'Links' section in the navigation tabs. If you choose 'Add to blogroll' as well, the link will appear in the list at the bottom of the sidebar.

It's also possible to subscribe to a thread to receive comments posted to it via email. If you check out your user profile, you can also turn on 'auto-subscribe,' and everything you post will result in being subscribed to the thread in question.

Also... it's mah birthday. Hooray!

Following up on Jeremy's post on theology (!) in mathematics curricula, I thought it only appropriate to post a Christian education publishing house's website, and Bob Jones University Press absolutely fits the bill for being a flashpoint for those of us who grew up in the church.

Good Math, Bad Math points to the course description of a geometry class taught at a Christian high school,

Over on the Balloon Juice political blog, there's a discussion about Global Warming in which commenters speculate as to why conservative Christians tend to be so antagonistic towards the Global Warming concept. One commenter sums it up with this chestnut:

God promised he wouldn’t flood the earth twice. Egro, anyone who talks about melting icecaps is conspiring with Satan to deceive us as the end-times approach.

While it's snarky, that misses some of the real cultural antagonism that Evangelicals tend to feel towards environmentalists. I've got some longer-winded thoughts rolling around (some tied into Francis Schaeffer's role as the saddened father of the Christian Political Right), but for now a summary will have to do.