Sunday Superlatives 3/27/11

March 27, 2011 Rachel Held Evans

Farewell, C.S. Lewis?

Around the blogosphere…

Best critique:
Carson Clark with “A Cordial Response to Rachel Held Evans’ Post “The Future of Evangelicalism”
While I don’t agree with every part of Carson’s analysis, I really learned a lot from this insightful critique and would love your thoughts on it.
“It seems that she, like so many writers, doesn’t get that blogs suggest a distorted reality…Blogs are like political primaries. The radicals come out in force, thus making the whole party look insane. I suspect it’s the same for the Neo-Reformed Movement. The civil, silent majority don’t show up in the traffic stats she referred to.”

Biggest Idea:
Shane Claiborne with “Give to Uncle Sam What is Uncle Sam’s”
“Imagine what would happen if a massive popular movement of ordinary Americans decided to voice their concern about military spending – by withholding $10.40 from their 1040 tax forms this year? A simple, small, symbolic, but concrete gesture of protest to the $200,000 dollars a minute being spent on militarism while programs that support life go bankrupt.”

Most Insightful:
Jeff Cook (at Jesus Creed) with “Rob Bell and C.S. Lewis"
"There’s not one controversial idea in Love Wins that is not clearly voiced as a real possibility by the most popular evangelical writer of the last century, CS Lewis.”

Most Relatable:
Emerging Mummy with “In which God uses the ‘foolish’ things to confound the ‘wise’"
"There was this TV preacher that I sort of hated. Like, I would see his face on the TV or grinning from yet-another-bestseller on the rack at the Barnes and Noble and want to shriek words like "heresy!" and "false teacher!" and "step away from the teeth whitener and the self tanner, for the love of all that is holy!"… And then one day, a friend called."

Most Relevant to Recent Discussions:
Bob Hyatt (at Out of Ur) with “Our Journey Toward Women in Leadership: I Timothy 2:11-12"
“It’s necessary to place the passage within the larger context of 1 Timothy 2. It seems that the end of chapter 2 which states that 'women will be saved through childbearing' was correcting a heresy in the early church. As it is translated in English—and without a cultural understanding of the times in which it was written—it sounds as if women are saved by means of having children. But Paul was, in fact, correcting some proto-Gnostic heretics that claimed women were the cause of humanity’s fall and that God was very, very displeased with them. To be saved, then, women needed to give up their sexuality and become more like what really pleases God, namely men..”

Best Headline:
Alise Wright (guest posting at Friendly Atheist) with “How an Atheist Made Me a Better Christian”
“..What I’ve found in the past year and a half is that getting to know some atheists has made me more like the Christian that I want to be.”

Best Question:
Food Blogga with “What’s the difference between red cabbage and radicchio?"
(So it's not exactly theologically or philosophically profound...but I've ALWAYS wondered!)

Best Church Story:
Dan Kimball with “Celebrating Purim as a Church”

Creepiest Photo:
Matthew Paul Turner with “How Not to Say Jesus Loves You”

And if you’re a blogger, you should know that the Blog Rocket has launched! Congrats to my friend Bryan Allain for getting it off the ground.

On the Blog…

Most Popular Comment (with 14 “likes”)
In response to “Rachel, The Very Worst Pacifist,” Scot Miller wrote:
“Maybe the problem is how we think about pacifism. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., were nonviolent, but they aggressively resisted evil. Nonviolent resistance is still resistance. Maybe pacifism means seeking peace, but using nonviolent resistance to confront evil.”

IRL…

This morning I had the pleasure of worshipping alongside some amazing people at RISE Church. Thanks especially to Brent Levy for rocking an Avett Brothers song in my honor! Love this group.

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I think I need to update my Google Reader. So....

Who are some of your favorite bloggers? What Web sites do you visit regularly?

And as always, feel free to share interesting links from your own blog or someone else's.