I have a new blog. You can find it here. I didn't like the look or title of this one anymore, and I've been wanting to switch to Wordpress for a while. I will keep ChristianThinker.net up a bit longer, if only to keep a record of my ongoing debate with Uncle Skeptic, if he's still out there. =)

Everyone that follows this blog in a feed reader, please update your RSS feeds. That goes for both of you!

It looks like The Evangelical Outpost has relaunched in an online journal format, with multiple contributors and Joe Carter as the Senior Editor. It's good to have you back, Joe. I'll put EO back on my Google Reader feed now.

I've updated the "Reading List" section on the right with some of the books I'm reading this semester. When will I get back to blogging? It's hard to say, since the amount of free time I can devote to the blogosphere seems to be less and less. Hopefully soon, however, since I have quite a few topics I'd like to discuss. Heck, the Lost Season 4 premiere was last night and I'm not even sure I'll be able to post on that. Times are hectic.

Regular posting is to resume shortly here at ChristianThinker.net, but in the meantime, does anyone know what happened to Prosthesis? I liked that guy.

I have great news for all humanity: the wisest, most charming and most beautiful woman in the world is now blogging. Drink ye deeply of her insights and enjoy.

No time for thinking, thus only for linking. Here are a few things I've found interesting today:

• Thou Shalt Not Kill, Except in a Popular Video Game at Church. On Halo as evangelism. [HT: Joystiq]
• What God Has Joined. An interesting take on Jesus' view of OT stipulations on divorce. [HT: Justin Taylor]
• Denny Burk: Presidential Candidate Calls for Kingdom Come. I wonder if Theocracy Watch will call Obama a "dominionist" for this.
• Al Mohler: Is Creationism a Threat to Human Rights? Only if you think that belief in the tooth fairy depletes the ozone layer.

Joe Carter puts me in his top 20 blogs. I hope he hasn't been drinking.

Rodney Dunning, a Christian and a professor of physics at Longwood University, has recently started a new blog with the very Thomistic name of Physica Theologica. I have added it to the blogroll.

James Dobson would be proud.

[HT: Blue's News]

I am now twittering. There's a box on the left sidebar where I can update what I'm currently doing via web or TXT message. Not that anyone cares, of course, but I think it's pretty cool.

I have added the following blogs to the blogroll for your reading pleasure:

• Victor Reppert. Good thinking by a fine Christian philosopher.
• Dmitry Chernikov. I wish I was as smart as this guy.
• Michael Krahn. A fellow Mark Driscoll afficionado. 'Nuff said.

Two voluminous lists and feeds of Southern Seminary bloggers can be found here and here. These represent the best and brightest young minds of the SBC. Or, perhaps, the most obtuse and foolish. I'm not sure which.

I've finally enabled comments again, at least for entries going back a few months. Hopefully this will decrease the number of spam comments on older posts while allowing for discussion on the most recent entries. Also, I've added a few sub-categories under the "Philosophy" category on the left. I'm hoping this will motivate me to do a few more posts in some of those areas of philosophy that I'm interested in, instead of just posting on the latest news story or a movie I've seen. I also moved a few older entries into the new sections so they wouldn't look totally bare.

Some of you have probably noticed this, but comments have been disabled here for the last month or so. I was getting flooded with spam comments, and I'm still trying to figure out how to handle it, but I hope to have a solution soon.

I have added Siris to the blogroll on the left. And this of course has nothing to do with the fact that the author recently read my Berkeley/Edwards paper and posted on it.

I've added two new blogs to the blogroll on the left: Verum Serum and Right Reason. I enjoy reading both of these.

Philosophy professor Doug Groothius of the Constructive Curmudgeon foregoes traditional New Year's resolutions and instead gives us Fifteen Refusals for 2007. I enthusiastically concur with fourteen of these, although I must resolutely reject the first proposition expressed in number seven.

[HT to Bill Vallicella]

My friend Trent Hunter recently started what looks to be an insightful new blog. Check out Above All Things. I have added it to the blogroll.

And on a related note, if any of you readers out there (1) like my blog (2) have a blog of your own and (3) said blog is not insane, heretical, or downright stupid, I offer you a blogroll trade. Put a link to ChristianThinker.net on your blogroll and I'll put you on mine. I think some of you out there already have me listed but I have not returned the favor, so be sure to let me know about that too.

I'd like to announce that Dr. Andrew Jackson has launched RedBlueChristian.com, a group blog devoted to dialogue between Christians of varying political stripes, and I am one of the contributors. I wanted ChristianThinker.net to stay away from politics, but apparently I've been unsuccessful, as I noticed the other day that the Category counter on the left says I've posted more about politics than any other subject! So I'll be moving some of my thoughts on politics over to RBC and keep ChristianThinker focused on philosophy, apologetics, and theology. However, I'll always post a link to my posts at RBC, and here's my first one.

I am now a dual blogger. I figured my readers here at ChristianThinker.net don't really care what I have to say about video games, so I started a new blog devoted to one of my favorite recreational activities. It's called gamer/Christian and you can find it here. I've recently been wanting to start something like this since there are all kinds of Christian sites and blogs that take a critical look at TV, movies, books, etc., but very few that do the same for video games. And while we're on the subject of games and new blogs, my Xbox 360 has started its own blog. Very weird.

My friend Aaron Hernandez has entered the blogosphere. Check out Observations from Afar. Be advised: he is somewhat of a wild and crazy fellow.

Christian Carnival CXXIV is up over at Jeremy Pierce's Parableman blog. And thanks to Jeremy for including me in the lineup.

New blog. Christian Logic. Good stuff. Check it out.

Mark Overstreet, Assistant Vice President of Development at Criswell College, has a blog you can find here. Mark and I worked for the same company while he was working on his doctoral degree at Southern, and I always found him to be an extremely intelligent and engaging guy. He's already doing some good work over at his blog, so go check it out. I'll add it to the blogroll on the left in the next few days.

[HT: Denny Burk]

Douglas Groothius, professor of philosophy at Denver Seminary, has a great blog you can find here. It's not much to look at, but Groothius is a sharp guy. I have added it to the blogroll on the left.

[HT: John DePoe]

Here's a few things of interest from the blogosphere and around the web:

• Church changes: Are some churchgoers going post-charismatic?
• Taliban Lite: Joe Carter has some good insight concerning the Afghani man on trial for becoming a Christian
• Political opinion column: George Will: "Bleakness in Baghdad"
• Watch this: Is this the future of the internet?
• Fun stuff: The best homemade lightsaber duel in history!

Here are a few things of interest from the blogosphere and the rest of the web:

• Political opinion column: Mona Charen on the logic of reproductive rights
• Death of the wicked: Al Mohler comments on the demise of Slobodan Milosevic and the nature of true justice
• Learn something: The Maverick Philosopher defines "enthymeme". This one's for my fellow logic-choppers.
• Noah's Ark?: Here's an article at Space.com about continued research into the "Ararat anomaly"
• Philosophical smackdown: Alvin Plantinga picks apart the opinion of the Dover, Pennsylvania judge who ruled against the teaching of Intelligent Design in public schools because it isn't science.
• Fun stuff: X-Men 3 trailer

I finished with the recent studying I had to do, so the frequence of my posts should pick up again. Here's a few random things of interest from around the web:

• Friendly atheist rant: The AnalPhilosopher on leftist hostility to religion.
• Book review: Tim Challies reviews The Marketing of Evil.
• True liberal credentials: Roger Ebert brings some sanity to the Crash/Brokeback Mountain Best Picture "controversy."
• Shrinking liberal churches: Mark Driscoll posts on the reasons behind the shrinking of the PCUSA.
• Political opinion column: Cal Thomas on McCain '08.
• Funny stuff: Here's an argument for God's existence that I have never encountered before. My wife stares at me with mystified disbelief when I laugh out loud at this kind of stuff. I just tell her it's philosophers' humor. See also "The Existence of Chuck Norris" at the same blog: "Objection 1. It seems that Chuck Norris does not exist; because if one of two contraries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed. But the word 'Chuck Norris roundhouse kick' means that it is infinite painfulness ..."

Random things of interest from around the web:

• E-mail debate: Militant atheist Daniel Dennett and not-so-militant agnostic Michael Ruse square off on how vehemently one ought to oppose Intelligent Design.
• So it's not just me: Here's an article on the unique science and religion aspects of Lost over at Science & Theology News.
• Political opinion column: Mona Charen on a gay European's warning about the Islamification of Europe.
• Check this out: Live webcam of the South Pole.
• Fun stuff: Steven Spielberg confirms that Indiana Jones IV is a go. I guess it wasn't the "last" crusade after all.

Over the next few weeks I'll be focusing heavily on preparing for the comprehensive essays I have to write as part of the Ph. D. application process at Southern, so my posts may be few and far between. I shall return in force, however, soon after.

Random things of interest from around the web:

• Learn something: The Ontological Argument for God's existence at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Opinion column: Cal Thomas on the evangelical group taking on global warming. He makes some good points, but I think he's being a mite harsh.
• Book analysis: The Maverick Philosopher on unfriendly atheist Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
• Listen to this: The Revival Hymn from SermonIndex.net. Moving accounts of revival and exhortation set to the score of The Last of the Mohicans, among others.
• Fun stuff: It looks like the massive XBox 360 shortage may be soon coming to an end. It was apparently due to a lack of a single memory chip from a German manufacturer. Now if I just had an extra $400 ...

Tom Gilson over at Thinking Christian has tagged me. I'm nought but a babe at this blogging thing, but as far as I can tell it means I get to tell my readers the following:

Four Jobs You've Had

• Web Designer
• Men's Clothing Sales
• Cleaning Equipment Sales
• Wireless Sales

Four Places You've Lived

• Sheffield, Alabama
• Azle, Texas
• Florence, Alabama
• Louisville, Kentucky

Four Vacations You've Taken

• Disney World
• The Grand Canyon
• The Caribbean
• Atlantis - This was perhaps the best vacation I've ever taken. It's truly a paradise, and it's very popular with celebrities. The week we were there was also the week of the Annual NBA Players' Association Meeting. You could literally walk down the hall and pass Scottie Pippen, then Manute Bol, and on and on.

Four Vehicles You've Owned

• 1990 Mercury Sable
• 1988 Ford Bronco II
• 1996 Nissan Pathfinder
• 2001 Mitsubishi Galant

Four You Want to Tag

• Alex @ Alex Forrest's Blog
• That's it, really. I'm not close enough to any of the bloggers I like to feel comfortable tagging them. =)

Here's a few things of interest from the blogosphere and various corners of the web:

• Learn something light: Al Mohler expands his thoughts on reading from his popular post from last week about his bookworm habits.
• Learn something heavy: Over at The Prosblogion (a fine philosophy of religion blog), Matthew Mullins breaks down a recent philosophical paper on how Aristotle's solution to the problem of material constitution might be able to help us understand the nature of the Trinity.
• Political opinion column: Bill Buckley on the Muslim cartoon controversy: "Iconoclastic expressions in America are broadly condemned as being in bad taste. However, there is certainly freedom in America to deride Christ. This is done every day on Broadway, and every other day in Hollywood."
• Book review: Gene Edward Veith reviews and comments on vampire writer extraordinaire Anne Rice's novel about the boy Jesus. He finds her portrait surprisingly orthodox.
• Fun stuff pt. I: Is James Cameron's next movie the sci-fi epic Avatar?
• Fun stuff pt. II: Watch the trailer for Nacho Libre. Jack Black plays a Mexican priest who moonlights as a professional wrestler. It's from the director of Napoleon Dynamite, who seems to be a fairly devout Mormon, so maybe the irreverence will be kept to a minimum.

ChristianThinker.net has been live for about a month now, and I want to thank everyone who has stopped by the site or linked to me from their blog. To mark this pseudo-anniversary I thought I'd post a first month retrospective about my head-first dive into the world of blogging.

First, I think I need to answer the question of exactly why I started a blog. I've actually had to think about this alot. Since last spring I knew I wanted to start blogging, but as I worked to develop this site I had to ask myself if it was really worth it. Why go through all the work just to make my (probably incoherent) thoughts available to the public? I've settled on three main reasons.

1. To glorify God. Paul tells us that as Christians, we are to glorify God in everything we do. If by blogging I can use my gifts to testify to the grace and power of God in my life, then by all means I think I should do it.
2. To edify the Body. The advantage of any community's blogosphere is its ability to quickly distill, organize, and disseminate information that is important to that community's interests. In short, blogs, when done well, help to sharpen a community's thinking and expand its knowledge. The evangelical blogosphere does this, and it also maintains (mostly) healthy debates about theology and church life.
3. To help me out. I have to also confess that I started a blog for personal reasons. I wanted something to make me write, for example, and to therefore sharpen my writing skills. I also hope that having this blog will booster my credibility as a writer if I ever want to get published. But of course the goal of writing and being published is to glorify God and edify the Body.

My first month blogging has also consisted of a big jump in the amount of time I spend on the blogosphere. I went to blogs before I leapt into the fray myself, but like most bloggers, I now visit them every day. During this time I've learned quite a bit about the nature of the blogosphere: what kinds of folks blog, what drives them, general defining characteristics of blogging, etc. Since most of my time has been spent in the Christian blogosphere, I thought I'd list a few key features that I see as characteristic of evangelical blogging and bloggers in general.

1. Like most other bloggers, Christian bloggers tend to be more eccentric than regular people. I know many in the blogosphere will disagree with me on this point, but I really don't think there's any good reason to deny it. The Christian blogger spends a significant amount of his or her time and money to start up a blog. They may learn HTML or Photoshop. They at least learn the basics of using blog programs and uploading images to the web. This sort of behavior is not characteristic of the average person on the street, and definitely not of the average churchgoer. We are people who want to achieve something, who want to play our part in the great drama of human history by sitting at our keyboards and rambling on with opinions and assertions of varying degrees of merit. And it's all to the glory of God.
2. The evangelical blogosphere provides a venue for healthy Christian debate. Nothing happens in the evangelical world - no statement, no movement, no controversy - without the bloggers picking it up within nanoseconds. Positions are staked out, camps are formed, and the sparks begin to fly. In one sense this is healthy, because as biblical Christians we are called to contend for the faith that has been handed down to us, guarding against false doctrine and sloppy theology. But there's another side to that coin ...
3. The evangelical blogosphere provides a venue for unhealthy Christian debate. This desire for pinpoint accuracy in all things theology-related draws the more reactionary and critical elements within evangelicalism to the blogosphere, people that strain at a gnat to prove that their highly debatable conclusions are the only biblical alternative. There are certain targets that are too big for these sort of folks to ignore. Megachurches are one of these targets. One witnesses all sorts of hand-wringing in the blogosphere over the "dangerous" trend of megachurches. Because as everyone knows, there is an absolute correspondence between church growth and theology: the bigger your church is, the worse its theology must be. One recent blog blasted Rick Warren's church-building strategies as having "no biblical basis whatsoever." My problem with a lot of this type of blogging is the extent of the claim. All Christians and churches have some tweaking of their theology to do, some more than others. But some evangelical bloggers feel that it's perfectly acceptable for them to make sweeping generalizations about megachurches, or about Rick Warren, or about charismatics, or whatever. All of these bloggers mean well, but I fear their theological grasp extends a true biblical reach, and the result is that they make unjustified attacks against their Christian brothers and sisters.

I could make more observations, but I'll limit it to these points. There is much good and bad in the evangelical blogosphere, but I'd say the good outweighs the bad by a substantial factor. Essentially, I see blogging as a new format for relationships and discussion, a twenty-first century venue for Christians to engage in community-related activities outside the local church. The blogosphere has many benefits, but there are also many dangers. I'll close by quoting some wise words from one of Russ Moore's recent posts:

I sense an even sadder and more dangerous temptation in the explosion of the blogosphere in recent years. One can sit in one's underwear, or in a darkened corner of a Starbucks, and throw out all kinds of suggestions about the actions and motives of others, under the guise of "looking for comments" from the blogging world. And one can build quite a blog presence that way. Be the place where everyone can go to find that delicious morsel of bad news or, even worse, paint oneself as a martyr-blogger standing against the conspiratorial machinations of "The Man," and one can attract as many onlookers as the little old lady who always knows who hasn't been tithing lately. Gossip still attracts those who love it. It's just not the local president of the Woman's Missionary Union shelling out these days, but a thirtysomething sitting in a Starbucks all day with a laptop, a latte, and a microchip on his shoulder.

Here's a few things of interest from the blogosphere and various corners of the web:

• McLaren blogosphere controversy: Emergent church leader Brian McLaren recently wrote about his position on homosexuality at Christianity Today's Leadership blog. Responses from evangelicals were swift. Here's a brief rundown of some of the give and take:
  
  - McLaren's original post
  - Mark Driscoll's response
  - Leadership blog's official response
  - Joe Carter's response
  - McLaren's response to the responses
  - Denny Burke's response to McLaren's response to the responses



• Learn something: Papers by Alvin Plantinga
• Political opinion column: George Will on the State of the Union
• Fun stuff: Do you know what the most profitable day in entertainment history for a single commercial property was? Here's a hint: it wasn't a movie opening. It was the launch of Halo 2 for the Microsoft XBox in 2004. I'm a pretty big Halo fan myself, but now it looks like the sequel for XBox 360 may not come out until 2007. Bill Gates once (in)famously said in Time magazine that Halo 3 would launch at the same time as Sony's Playstation 3, but he has now eaten his words. The window between the release of the original (November 2001) and the sequel (November 2004) was three years, so Gates was probably way off by predicting the release of Halo 3 only a year and a half to two years out from Halo 2. If Bungie needs as much of a window this time then we have to wait at least until Fall 2007 before we get to play as the Master Chief again. Oh well.