A Little End-of-Summer Cleaning

When I find an article that interests me, I sometimes copy and paste a link to it and save it for use in a future weekly blog. When I find I have a bit of a back-log of articles, I end up tossing a lot of them out.

But as I was getting ready to throw out some of the articles I knew wouldn’t make it into a blog, I found two that I wanted to make sure I mentioned. I believe I found out about both of them through http://www.teampyro.blogspot.com/.

The first article is about a new booklet from Kevin DeYoung describing why his congregation switched to the ESV translation. It can be found here. In the article and the comments that follow are some great thoughts on the nature and purpose of translation.

The second article is by Rodney Stark and Byron Johnson, writing in the WSJ, and correcting the assumption that the church is losing young people in droves.

What interested me about this article is that it directly attacks many of the narratives put out by George Barna. Barna has been highlighting the declining attendance of young people in the church and proposing some ways to combat the trend that I believe would only make the problem he purports to observe worse. This is an important article for many of those who are so desperate to appear relevant to read. Check it out here.

Thanks for letting me clean out some of my summer junk!