A Word on Blogs and Books

One of the few people who have inspired me to blog is Joe Thorn. I find his resourcefulness and pastoral insights helpful; his love for his family and the church is evident; his appreciation for culture and his down to earth honest approach to things is refreshing and encouraging for me personally. If you haven't read his stuff I highly recommend him to you now. He's given a needed caution to feeding on blogs more than books (and you know this is easy to fall into).

Many of us tend to rush through blog posts rather than give them the serious consideration which could yield better fruit. It’s just so easy to “read” online while rapidly clicking from one thing to the next, moving between multiple open tabs on our browsers, all while the latest episode of Parks and Recreation plays in the corner of the screen.

I encourage people to read blogs, selectively, considering them to be supplemental to our reading diet. Blogs are good, but books are better and more important. Good books are better than good blogs because they generally offer a more serious, sustained, carefully edited and reviewed work focused on a given subject. A book will lead you to slow down, properly ingesting and digesting the words and ideas. Books are, I believe, better teachers. Blogs teach as well. I love blogs! But I hope you are reading more than the stuff in your feed reader.

Ouch. But he nails it. Read the rest of it here.

Doctrinal Books vs. Devotional Books

"For my own part I tend to find the doctrinal books more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await many others. I believe that many who find that 'nothing happens' when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand." - C.S. Lewis