Hiatus on account of travelling

Hi everyone! Just to let you know that there won't be much serious stuff on the blog for the next five weeks or so, as I'm in Europe with my wonderful wife. If you're keen to keep up with our travels, you can follow them here.

I'll be posting some photography here as I go, with the objective being that the last posted photos are significantly better than the first posted ones as I learn :) Here's one I took last night in Paris - the silhouette is my lovely wife.

It's noisy, unsharp and the white balance is totally unnatural, but I like the idea. Hopefully I'll get better as I go on.

Kim Kardashian is Ruining the Sanctity of Marriage

Recently Kim Kardashian, the woman famous for stone-cold nothing in particular, got married to some guy. Even more recently, she divorced that guy - 72 days after she married him, to be exact. She made millions of dollars out of the whole exercise.

Christians hold marriage in pretty high esteem. At the moment, lots of us are keen to uphold that high esteem by continuing to affirm the traditional definition of marriage as between a man and a woman. But really,doesn't this kind of moronic, cynical, celebrity weddingstravaganza rubbish bring marriage into disrepute much more? There's not much becoming one flesh about getting married to some bloke for less than three months and raking in the millions from the subsequent media deals and interviews. How is the undermining of marriage in the name of squillions of dollars and the perpetuation of the empty bubblehead cult of celebrity not a concern for Christians? Someone tell our church leaders that Kim Kardashian is ruining the sanctity of marriage.

The Mad Shepherd

John 10 came up at church tonight:

“I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep... I know my sheep and my sheep know me—  just as the Father knows me and I know the Father—and I lay down my life for the sheep...The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life—only to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father.”

It's a familiar passage, and a nice image - that of the good shepherd laying down his life for the sheep. But when you think about it, it's a bit weird. Crazy, even.

There Will Be No Economists In Heaven

This week at Bible study we were talking about money. Actually our study is doing a series on it; this was the second study, but I'd missed the first (and will miss the rest due to being overseas - more on that later maybe). The series is about how Christians should relate to and use money. Something caught my eye in the summary of the first study, though. It was this sentence:

God owns all the money.

Too-Late Post #2: John Piper and suffering

Easily the best picture of Piper on the internet.

Too-Late Post #2 is too late because John Piper was in Sydney on the 31st of August, at the Sydney Entertainment Centre, where he said some things that I was going to blog about but didn't, and now it's halfway through October and I'm only just getting around to it. Anyway, here goes.

Position Vacant: Labor Party Strategist

To whom it may concern,

This is what I imagine a political strategist to look like.

I write to apply for the position of Head Strategist for the Australian Labor Party, on the basis that its current occupant is a moron.

Too-Late Posts #1: On Christian Music

Welcome to Too-Late Post #1! The reason why this post is Too-Late is not because its subject matter is out of date (it's not), but because the thing that set my train of thought choofing along this particular track happened several weeks ago. A few people on Facebook managed to post links simultaneously to the video for the new single by Richard Beeston's band, All Mankind. It's called Break the Spell, and you can find it below, or after the jump: