HT: Stephen over at Thoughts of a Worshiper.

I’ll admit that I’m personally pretty skeptical of these healings. I guess I would have to talk to someone before and after being violently beat up by the speaker.

Thoughts?

As always, if you know of any Christian themed cartoons we should know about, send them our way.

This first one is from ASBO Jesus:

And from nakedpastor:

Thoughts?

Twitter has proved to be a useful means of communication in the aftermath of the China earthquake. The article rather briefly describes the ways that Twitter is being used to spread news and updates in the disaster area more effectively than traditional media channels.

When Web 2.0-ish tools like Twitter come along, it’s always tempting to dismiss them each as yet another narcissistic toy—but like blogging before it, Twitter has proven its worth beyond just relaying the minutia of your friends’ everyday lives. I was sold on Twitter’s usefulness last year during the southern California fires. I had many relatives and friends living in the fire-threatened areas, and was frantically checking news sites to determine whether or not my family was in serious danger. Most mainstream news articles and maps weren’t specific enough—I didn’t need to know what cities were in danger, I needed to know which streets were in danger. I came across a Twitter feed and Google map maintained by a radio station in the area that provided almost minute-to-minute updates about where the fires were and what streets were threatened. Many of my southern California friends and family were carefully watching those feeds as the crisis played out.

No big spiritual insights here—just an observation that some of the web tools I’d otherwise dismiss as somewhat silly can actually prove unexpectedly useful. What other tools out there have you put to interesting new use, perhaps in the service of ministry?

An eyewitness account of the cyclone and its aftermath in Burma. It’s long, but hard to stop reading once you start. Via Metafilter.

It’s Wednesday, which means it’s time for a new weekly poll!

First, a quick recap of last week’s. We asked what you would do if you felt that your pastor was in serious error over a non-salvation issue. 241 of you weighed in, and here’s what you said:

• The vast majority, 66%, said that they would remain in the church, but would bring their concerns about the pastor to the church leadership.
• The second most popular option, which 18% chose, was to leave the church after making their concerns known to the church leadershihp.
• After that, we’re into the single digits: 6% said that they wouldn’t do anything about such a disagreement so long as the Gospel was being preached. 5% said they’d leave the church quietly, without making a big deal out of it. And the last 5% said they’d probably be annoyed, but would stay at the church anyway.

Interesting results, as always. And now on to this week’s poll: What do you think of the Evangelical Manifesto? You can read the Evangelical Manifesto online, and we discussed it a bit here last week. Take a few minutes to read through the manifesto and vote in the poll on the right. And then, of course, share your comments below!

Another item to file in the Cool Internet Tricks department: Bible Geocoding. Most notable is a Google Earth map of every location from the Bible; you can click on a location to pull up the Bible passages in which it’s mentioned. Pretty nifty.

Very useful the next time you want to trace a Bible story as it unfolds across the ancient Mediterranean world, or when you really just need to find out where Ezion-geber is located. Also of interest on that site are other goodies, like an Bible geography overlays for Google Earth and lots of photos of Bible locations.

(Via an ESV Bible blog post about linguistic Bible maps—definitely something for the “really cool, but I’m not sure what to do with it” file.

One of my favorite blogs is Marc Heinrich’s Purgatorio. We’ve featured it in the past mainly because when one spends a good chunk of their time researching and thinking about Christianity like Andy and I do it helps to be able to take a step back and poke fun at some of the odd-ball things it produces.

Marc does a few weekly thematic posts. One of my favorites is Divine Vinyl, pretty much solely because of this album cover:

Anyway…

Today is T-shirt Tuesday where they post a picture of one of those evangelistic T-shirts. You know, the kind that take something from popular culture and using (moderately clever) word-play twist it to ask a question or present the gospel ‘creatively’.

Here’s the one from today:

Now, it’s easy for me to dismiss these as ignorant goofballery, but in an effort to give the vast Christian merchandising business the benefit of the doubt, I’ve decided to step warily off my extremely high horse and ask a few questions of you, our ThinkChristian readers.

Has any part of your journey with Christ been positively impacted by one of these shirts? And/or do you personally know anyone who has been impacted by one of these shirts?

And, as always, I would like you to weigh in with any other opinions.

Is our world sliding towards hell in the proverbial handbasket? Is society today more evil than previous generations, and is it going to keep getting worse until Jesus returns?

There’s an interesting post at the IMAGE blog about the fall of ‘declinism’, in which the author Gregory Wolfe suggests that belief in the “everything is getting worse” school of thought seems to be on the decline.

He closes with a provocative quote by Annie Dillard that I’ll reproduce here:

There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: a people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful, and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive, and conquer; who pray for their loved ones, and long to flee misery and skip death. It is a weakening and discoloring idea, that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time—or even knew selflessness or courage or literature—but that it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less. There is no less holiness at this time—as you are reading this—than there was the day the Red Sea parted, or that day in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, on the fifth day of the month, as Ezekiel was a captive by the river Chebar, when the heavens opened and he saw visions of God

What’s your reaction? Pretty much everybody who’s ever lived has believed that their generation was the worst, most sinful generation in history; and Bible passages like 2 Timothy 3 are often used to support the idea that the world will get increasingly sinful in its final days.

Is that how you interpret those verses, and others that talk about the apostasy and evil that precedes Christ’s return? Are things steadily getting morally worse? Or are things about the same, morally speaking, as they’ve ever been? In a generation that has witnessed both the mass-murder of millions and massive global relief efforts to imperiled parts of the world, it might be tough to gauge whether we’re on a downward moral slope, an upward trajectory, or a flat plane….

(Via Looking Closer.)

The much-discussed Evangelical Manifesto, “an open declaration of who Evangelicals are and what they stand for,” has been released. Several high-profile evangelicals (perhaps most notably Os Guiness) helped to bring it into being, and it’s already been heavily debated on blogs and in the news.

It’s a blunt and ambitious document; its statements about the relationship between politics and Christianity are drawing the most commentary. There’s too much to simply quote here; I’d encourage you to go read it for yourself. Then come back here and share your thoughts. Did you sign the manifesto? Is a document like this a step in the right direction, and do you see it catching on in the broader evangelical world? Is it a much-needed refocusing of what it means to be an evangelical in a society battered by years of the Culture Wars?

I’ve just read through it quickly, and a few minor quibbles aside, there’s not much I can find to disagree with. How about you?

If you’re an avid reader of Christian blogs, you’ve probably run across Stuff Christians Like more times than you can count in the past few weeks. I happen to like the John Acuff’s oft-witty always insightful observations about the church.

Yesterday he wrote about Christians counting swearing in movies:

I have some friends that are like the Siskel and Ebert of movie profanity. (I know that one of them is dead, but if I said “Siskel and Roper” I’m not sure the opener would have worked the same way.) Whenever I ask them how a movie was, the first thing they say is, “It was pretty good, but it had 14 swears. Couple of S’s, one GD, seven F’s and one MF.”

...

Why give other sinful things a free pass? Why just pick on swearing? Shouldn’t we also count things like idolatry? Anytime someone in a movie drives a really nice car or lives in a home bigger than us and we feel a little jealous of their life, that should count as one “idol.” I mean every super hero movie on the planet is written so that men in the audience think, “It would be so cool to be that guy.” Sorry Iron Man. Or stealing, anytime someone steals a car in a movie to chase down a bad guy that should count as stealing.

Such a good point to ponder really. I’ve often wondered about this very thing in relation to violence as well. It seems that depictions of murder are far more acceptable than depictions of sex.

So, is there a hierarchy of acceptability with the depiction of sin in movies? Is there a line that a movie has to cross in order to become unacceptable? Other thoughts?