RobbyMac on Apologies

RobbyMac has put out a creative piece entitled Apology at OK Corral. He deals with the fact that:

"...so many people apologize, and immediately say 'forgive me'. And, maybe this will sound a little weird, but sometimes it feels like they ask for forgiveness as a way of not really dealing with the damage they've caused."

He calls this "'Apology At Gunpoint'; where if you don't 'forgive and forget' immediately, you become the problem."

He's not down on apologies -- just the fake ones that we all tend to do just a little more often than we should.

The Future of Ebooks

Articles like this make me feel good about the fact that my novel is being published by an electronic media publisher. It's a rebuttal by Alexander Wolfe to a statement by Ray Bradbury that ebooks will never take off.

I found it via Website At the End of the Universe in which Capt. Zerox has more things to say on the subject:

I think both ebooks and paper books both have a future. Neither media is going to replace the other, just like movies weren't replaced by television, but I can foresee a time that people read the news or the latest bestseller on some low-cost, portable electronic reader that mimics analog books.

An earlier post of his even says, Publishers wonder whether ebooks have reached critical mass.

However, at this point, we're still making plans that fit strictly with our current income from teaching school, plus faith in the Most High. I've been burned too often by pinning my hopes on something that hasn't actually materialised yet.

to the least of these

Alan Chreech has been putting two and two together and getting something we all need to be paying attention to. There's the saying 0f Yeshua, "whoever does it to the least of these has done it to me", which we all know, but if you look at it in the light of another one, "Love one another as I have loved you...", it goes abit deeper. Here's what he says:

... What if God actually wanted us to love people for who they really were? I'm serious about this now. I believe God wants us to purely love the nasty, torn up people that we are looking at AS nasty, torn up people, not just as a mask for Jesus. ...

... better if you read the whole post...

Novella -- The Wrong Time

I've had an idea for this novel for quite a long time. I finally got around to writing it, and it turned out to be more of a novella -- too short for a novel, but too long for a short story.

It's in the Science Fiction genre, an exploration of the "Many Worlds" interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. That means it's about parallel universes.

It's hard to find a publisher for novellas, so I'll just post it on the site as a free douwnload -- yet another incentive to visit the author's page once my novel, Pepe, hits the market.

So, here it is .... The Wrong Time

Two Problems

I found this via Next Reformation. It's a pair of questions that seems to go the heart of what's wrong with Christianity today:

1. Present day Christians are not very good at accepting outsiders (sinners who do not follow Jesus).

2. Present day Christians are far too accepting of sinful behavior from insiders (Christians who have been following Jesus long enough to know better).

Shouldn’t it be just the opposite?

Any thoughts about why this is so?

Some good thoughts expressed on both blogs.

Alan Creech on (un)faithful Catholics

Alan Creech has an interesting discussion going on his blog regarding how much flexibility of opinion there is within Roman Catholic Church. There seems to be quite a good margin for what he calls "faithful dissent" although some of the more conservitave Catholics might brand you as an "unfaithful" Catholic.

Quite a few Catholic Emergent types have weighed in. I, as a "Protestant by default (believe in Yeshua but wasn't baptised Catholic)" commented that maybe the only true "Protestants" might be found inside the Catholic Church (at least there, they know what they're "protesting" about!).

This one, by a Catholic named "Tom", who got his education at a "conservative" Catholic university, had this to say:

I've often felt that the Church's insistance on infalibility--even though widely misunderstood--creates a Pandora's box of sorts. When an institution insists that it not only doesn't make mistakes, but cannot make mistakes, then the historical record becomes problematic and requires mental gymnastics.

Anyway, go there for a good read...

Call for Apostles

I found the link to this while reading Charlie Wear's blog:

Where are all the apostles?
I find myself missing them more and more lately. Which is interesting because I'm not even sure what I'm missing. What is it I want an apostle to do for me? It seems like there must be something. Is there anyone in the Church today that has the authority to say the kinds of things that Paul did? We're drowning in opinions and strategies and "movements" and "we just need to get back tos." But we don't seem to have anyone that can stand up and say, "I'm an apostle by the will of God. All this nonsense has to stop because it's divisive and it's fruitless. And whoever disagrees with me, let's just see which of us God's power stands behind!"

That was Scott Bane. It's been a while since I heard anyone talking about apostles. I believe apostles are to be a part of the latter-time landscape. I'm aware that many people who claim to be apostles, or saying that this one or that one is an apostle (and therefore you're out of order if you don't listen to him/her), but I don't believe they've fully arrived yet. If they have, they're hidden for the moment. The test of who's really an apostle may well be what Scott says above, someone with the boldness to suffix his proclamation with, "...and whoever disagrees with me, let's just see which of us God's power stands behind!"

That would only work for a true apostle.