Your Best Links Now – 1/9/14
Top 50 Countries Where It’s Hardest to be a Christian
Christian martyrdoms doubled in 2013. (The United States isn’t on the list.) “The purpose of the report is to ‘create effective anger,’ leading people to pray and act on behalf of persecuted Christians…It creates awareness and it requires a strategic response. And great research is the only way that effective anger can be produced.”
Sofia the First and George Orwell
Of princesses, principles, and philosophies. One of those moralistic comic strips.
The Boy Scout Sleeping Outside for a Year (In Minnesota)
“Rudy, a 17-year-old Life Scout from the northern Minnesota city of Hermantown, is nearly 200 nights in to his quest to sleep outside for 365 nights in a row. Any Boy Scout living in Miami or Maui could pull off that feat, but Rudy lives in Hermantown, a suburb of Duluth, where tomorrow’s high temperature is 5 degrees. By the weekend, it could get down to minus-18. Consider that as you sip your hot cocoa by the fire this week.”
A TED Talk About Why TED Talks Don’t Work
“TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. To me, TED really stands for Middlebrow Megachurch Infotainment.” Later: “More Copernicus; less Tony Robbins.”
Are You Ready to Go to Heaven? Colton Is.
My cousin Steve shares about a touching exchange with his fourteen year-old son Colton, who was born with spina bifida. Some of my readers may remember some of Steve’s journal entries from when he and his wife were expecting Colton appeared in my book Your Jesus is Too Safe covering their struggle of faith and doubt when it was recommended they terminate the pregnancy. I’m glad they chose life. And I’m glad Colton has chosen life too.
