Micha Boyett on Hermeneutics (a wonderful blog, not just for the ladies you know…) on Ann Voskamp, Tim Challies and dinner. Beautifully done. 

The Rising number of singles. Are churches adjusting? 

I could quit making this list and just post RHE’s Sunday Superlatives. She does a nice job picking good stuff.

The ex-good-Christian-woman by Kathy Escobar

The Problem with Light: Reflections on the Life and Death of Thomas Kinkade

Sometimes, my own students’ writing tends toward warmly lit windows and picket fences. Twenty year olds can be terribly nostalgic. They feel old to themselves. Beginning, as some of them are, to touch the razored edges of loss, they, too, seek to build worlds that never quite were. They believe there is some kind of goodness tucked in this, an honoring of sorts, a preservation of some golden thread of feeling.

That’s why in nearly every creative writing class I teach I eventually offer this truism: in this world, every light that shines on something creates a shadow, and you have to write both, own both, or your work will be hollow. Learn to hold life’s tensions.

The problem with light is that we assume it always reveals, but light without its requisite shadow, which is a light of our own making, conceals. The true light of reality, of God, illumines what is genuinely there, unearthing our darknesses. The soft, fuzzy glow of sentimentality that distracts from the shadows we’ve edited out, exaggerating what never truly was, is a deceiving angel.

The Patheos piece on Kinkade

How Orthodoxy differs from Protestantism  Lots to think about in this one.