Random Acts of Verbiage

Welcome to the 168th edition of the Christian Carnival! For those that follow the Christian Carnival, you may have noticed that it hasn’t happened in a few weeks; Dory over at Wittenberg Gate has been out of contact as of late (please be praying that everything is ok with her!) so this is kind of a make-shift edition as we don’t have access to the normal Christian Carnival email. Because of this, posts for the last three weeks have been accepted and I will also be adding posts until Friday since many of you may not have known about the change. If you would like to have your post added, don’t send it to the usual email address but to me at matt510@gmail.com. Including my post, we only had seven submissions, so get me some more posts! Also, if you want to make up for lost time and want to check out previous editions, you can check out my Christian Carnival Archive. Next week’s carnival will be hosted by Mandi over at Imago Dei. I will accept posts written before today (Wednesday) up until Friday, posts written between today and next Tuesday should be submitted to Mandi at praisingfool@gmail.com. I hope that makes sense!

Without further ado, here is this week’s Christian Carnival!

Since I am the host, I will stroke my ego and lead off with my post:
Matt Jones of Random Acts of Verbiage presents Jesus is Offensive. It is true, Jesus offends people all the time. I take a look at why and what that means.

John Howell of Brain Cramps for God invites discussion (and entries for an eventual carnival or sub-carnival) on whether the fourth Gospel should be named “John or The Fourth Evangelist“.

Laurie Bluedorn of Trivium Pursuit presents Brothers, Embrace the Providence of God! an article written by Mike Evans.

Martin LeBar of Sun and Shield presents The Language of God, Chapters 4 and 5, by Francis Collins which is part of a series of posts on Collins’ book.

Collins has been the director of the Human Genome Project for several years. He is also a Christian, and a good writer. In this post, I discuss his chapters on the origin of life, and on viewing DNA as “The Language of God.” I quote Collins a couple of times. This is probably the most important book on Christianity and Science published in this century so far. Its basic conclusion is that, if both are properly interpreted, there is no conflict between the Bible and science.

Editor’s note: Amen to that!

Jan Lynn over at The View From Her offers up God Flexed, a powerful illustration of how the resurrection displays God’s strength.

Mandi from Imago Dei brings us a post simply titled Masculinity: “We need more men to teach their sons how to be men.” Editor’s note: Read up guys!

Ron from Northern ‘burbs blog asks The Mega Question: It is the start of a discussion on the structure and purpose of the church where he asks for input. The initial focus will be on the megachurch structure.

Jeremy from Parableman shares The Ten Western Commandments: A look at a Veggie Tales epic; What would the ten commandments have been if they’d been given in the Old West?

Mark Kelly from kainos shares with us his post Don’t throw this gift away because “The way we talk about “losing salvation” only confuses the real issue.”

Erich Bridges over at Counterculture asks What language does God speak? If we’re going to take the Good News of Jesus to immigrants next door and lost peoples across the world, we need to commit ourselves to learning their “heart languages.”

John Hollandsworth over at Light Along the Journey takes a closer look at who we define as our enemies and how Christ enables us to express Supernatural Love.

Rey from the Bible Archive shows us the Humiliation of Death. In his personal blog he tries to answer the question How come God lets bad things happen?

Glenn Jordan from Crooked Shore writes about Good Fridays Abandonment because Good Friday brings us face to face with abandonment, but forces us to wait for something beyond Holy Saturday.

Henry Neufeld over at Participatory Bible Study Blog presents Galatians 3:15-18 – Preliminary Thoughts on Seed and Seeds: Starting from comments by J. Louis Martyn, whose Anchor Bible commentary on Galatians he is currently reading, he discusses the place of the law in salvation history in this passage.

David Ker of Lingamish, a Bible translator in Mozambique, is chronicling a month of life for his family in an African village and presents us with Dinthi Day 23.

Lillie Ammann of A Writer’s Words, An Editor’s Eye presents Good Friday: The Way of the Cross and the Vigil at the Altar of Repose so stop by and check it out!

Barbara from Tidbits and Treasures presents for your reading enjoyment Honesty is the best policy.