TTF Staff
Anne Rice, On Faith blog
“This was not a joyful moment for me. It wasn’t an easy moment. It was an admission that I loved and believed in God, and that my old atheism was a façade. I knew it was going to be difficult to return to the Maker, to give over my life to Him, and become a member of a huge quarreling religion that had broken into many denominations and factions and cults worldwide. But I knew that the Lord was going to help me with this return to Him. I trusted that He would help me. And that trust is what undergirds my faith to this day.”
Faiths and Worldviews, Spiritual Growth, Mon 09 Jun 2008
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What you have to do to be a success must be addressed only after you have found a reason to be successful.
Neil Postman
Hannah and Nathan (Audio) by Wendell Berry, foreword by Gregory Wolfe.
Steve Brown narrates this Trinity Forum Reading selection that helps us think about love, marriage, and our place in the world.
Aitken on McDonald in the American Spectator
Let all mortal flesh keep silence
Money is the new secret of a happy job: Maybe? “Over the past decade, the rich, professional classes have developed an increasingly unhealthy attitude to their jobs. We took our jobs and our fat salaries for granted and felt aggrieved if our bonuses were not even bigger than the year before. We demanded that the work be interesting in itself and, even more dangerously and preposterously, that it should have meaning.” (Lucy Kellaway, Financial Times • 2008 12 15)
Gee, One Bold Storm coming up….: “Oh, yes Stephen. That’s all very well, but you try being a CEO in the real world of share prices and financial officers. Bullshit. Any CEO who hides behind his shareholders isn’t worthy of their job: I’ve met enough business leaders to know that the good ones lead, they don’t follow. Isn’t that kind of what ‘leader’ means? I seem to be straying. But it’s all relevant really and it all needs saying again and again. Managers, corporates, finance people, executives in tech companies – they all need to understand for the sake of their pride and happiness as much as their success, this simple rule: ‘That’ll do’ won’t do. ‘That’s good enough’ is never good enough.” Also, a psychological insight on the success of the iPhone. (Stephen Fry • 2008 12 10)
A biblical lesson for today’s bankers: From Spain: ‘Bringing the biblical idea up to date, Governor Ordóñez suggested financial regulators insist that banks build up their capital at an enhanced rate during prosperous years to put them in better financial shape should a serious slump follow with many boom-time loans turning sour. Actually, a predecessor of Ordóñez in the 1990s, Governor Luis Angel Roja, did just that. He put into practice a regulatory mechanism termed “dynamic provisioning.” This, notes Ordóñez, has reinforced the present stability of the Spanish banking system “and today commands wide recognition.” The biblical story indicates that economies are “unequivocally cyclical,” notes Ordóñez. Since Joseph, 4,000 years ago, “perhaps we have made some progress … it seems that the years of plenty are somewhat longer than the lean years,” he adds. “But little more than that.” ’ (Christian Science Monitor, h/t • 2008 12 10)
Lessons From the Great Books Generation: ‘The volumes included Adler’s “Syntopicon,” an index compiled at enormous cost that tracked the 102 great ideas, pointing, for example, to how different thinkers addressed concepts like virtue and obligation. These great ideas were criticized as arbitrarily chosen, but at least they were important ideas. A Google research project is now bringing massive computing power to data-mine quotes and ideas across one million digitized books, updating this approach to tracking ideas.’ (L. Gordon Crovitz, The Wall Street Journal • 2008 12 07)
• The Left Wing of America’s Civil Religion (2008 12 04)
• Beauty of Soul: Oscar Wilde & Anton Chekhov (2008 12 02)
• Children’s Books, Lost and Found (2008 11 21)
• John Piper explains Why Calvinists are so Negative (2008 11 19)
• Confessions of an Obnoxious Orthodox (2008 11 19)
Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy: A Life by Jean Bethke Elshtain.
An account of Jane Addams’s legacy, her embrace of “social feminism” and challenge to the usual cleavage between “conservative” and “liberal,” and the growth of Chicago’s famed Hull House into a thriving cultural and intellectual center.
