Monthly Archive for December, 2011

Decorah Eagle Comes Full Circle

Published on December 30, 2011 in Creation. 3 Comments

My wife, who followed the eagles on her Ipad, and whose teenage children will presumably fly away in the approaching years, will like this story of eagles circling back to the nest:

DECORAH, Iowa – She’s back. After a four-month, 900-mile tour of Minnesota and Wisconsin, D1, the world-famous, wired Decorah eagle, has returned to Decorah. “Who would have ever guessed? Not me,” said Bob Anderson, the raptor expert who fitted her with a satellite transmitter this summer.

Satellite data confirm that D1 roosted Wednesday night in a tree just north of Palisades Park on the east edge of Decorah. “She is so near to my house that if the transmitter was turned on I could get a beep from my doorstep,” said Anderson, director of the Raptor Resource Project, whose nest-cam website has been visited more than 213 million times this year. Anderson said he picked up her signal near the Yellow River in Allamakee County on Tuesday morning but was unable to track it to the bird herself.

On Wednesday morning, Anderson and a friend returned to the area and picked up a weak signal, which grew in strength as they traveled toward it on gravel roads. . .

Read the rest here.

Collin Hansen’s Top Stories of 2011

Published on December 30, 2011 in Recommended Links. 0 Comments

There is much for local church pastors and leaders to consider in Collin Hansen’s Top 10 stories of 2011.

Derek Thomas looks back on his conversion 40 years later

Published on December 30, 2011 in Soteriology. 0 Comments

There is much to be encouraged by and learn from Derek Thomas’ story of how he came to Christ 40 years ago.

It was forty years ago today (December 28, 1971) that I became a Christian. My conversion was Saul-like: sudden, unexpected, and decisive. I was eighteen, a freshman at university studying physics and math at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.
            I was not raised in a religious home. My memory holds only fleeting acquaintance with the church – a “Christening” in my early teens with just my mother, an Anglican vicar and myself present; the ritual of “confirmation classes” and the visit of the bishop followed by rebellion and atheism. By eighteen, I was, like most of my peers, a firm believer in science. The universe was the product of a Big-Bang and everything that exists – Mozart, The Beatles, Rembrandt, Salvador Dali, you name them – came from this primal event. Everything comes from nothing.
            Enter John Stott. In mid-December, 1971, a book arrived in the mail from my best friend. “Read it,” an enclosed card insisted. The book was Basic Christianity. Truth is, I had never read a Christian book in my life, not unless J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings counts as one (a book I had read several times). Nor had I read the Bible. In fact, I did not posses a copy.

Read the rest here.

Christianity Today’s Top 10 Christian Stories of 2011

Published on December 28, 2011 in News. 2 Comments

It is important for believers to stay abreast of developments in Christendom. CT’s first story should be of particular interest to evangelicals.

Click here for Christianity Today’s Top 10 stories of 2011.

Christopher Hitchens Has Died, Doug Wilson Reflects

Published on December 16, 2011 in Apologetics and death. 1 Comment

The well known atheist Christopher Hitchens died Thursday night. Doug Wilson, who debated Hitchens numerous times reflects in a Christianity Today article:

Editor’s Note: Christopher Hitchens has died at the age of 62. A statement from Vanity Fair said that he died Thursday night at cancer center in Houston of pneumonia, a complication of his esophageal cancer. CT asked Douglas Wilson to weigh in on the life and death of the prominent atheist.

Christopher Hitchens was a celebrity intellectual, and, as such, the basic outlines of his life are generally well known. But for those just joining us, Christopher Hitchens was the older of two sons, born to Eric and Yvonne in April 1949. He discovered as a schoolboy that probing questions about the veracity of the Christian faith were part of a discussion that he “liked having.” His younger brother, Peter, followed him in unbelief. But unlike Christopher, Peter publicly returned to the Church of England, the communion where they had both been baptized.

Christopher spent some time in the 1960s as a radical leftist, but of course that was what everybody was doing back then. Somehow Christopher managed to do this and march to a different drummer, doing his radical stint as part of a post–Trotskyite Luxemburgist sect. He graduated from Balliol at Oxford, and soon became established as a writer, the vocation of his life, one in which he excelled. As a writer and thinker, he was greatly influenced by (and wrote about) men like George Orwell and Thomas Jefferson, while as the same time reserving the right to attack any sacred cow of his choosing—and the more sacred, the better. He is widely known for his scathing attack on Mother Teresa, and when Jerry Falwell passed away, he spent a good deal of time on television chortling about it.

Read the rest here.

Hallelujah Flash Mob in the GSOI

Published on December 8, 2011 in Christmas. 5 Comments

It requires a certain degree of humility, if I may humbly say so, for a Central grad to share a Simpson link. Never the less, it is in the GSOI (“Great State of Iowa”) and this is well worth watching.