Finally I complete another entry on my reader-suggested reading list: Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell. Thanks Heather for the recommendation!

I’m having a harder time writing a review for this book than I have for any of the previous ones I’ve read. I’m not too sure what my conclusion is yet. Some general observations are in order, though.

First, I’m not too keen on the general writing style. The book is full of single sentences masquerading as paragraphs. Now, these aren’t long, Pauline run-on sentences; these are short, one line sentences with lots of white space between them. As a consequence, to me the book sounds less like a well-reasoned argument for something and more like a collection of little thoughts that don’t necessarily connect so well. Maybe I’m just too old to get it.

Second, I haven’t seen Rob Bell’s NOOMA videos. I’ve heard they’re pretty good, and they might clue me in on a little more of what he’s thinking. I haven’t heard any other of Bell’s stuff, either, so all I have to base my understanding of him on is this book.

There were a couple things that I disagreed with in there. First of all, towards the beginning of the book he goes through this extended illustration about how doctrines are like the springs on a trampoline - how they serve to propel us and our faith and our actions. Fine, I guess, OK. But then he goes on to argue that, hey, even if you’re missing a spring, that doesn’t mean that the trampoline won’t work. I’m starting to get a little queasy with the illustration at that point. Then he says, hey, so if the virgin birth doesn’t happen to be true, that spring pops off the trampoline, that doesn’t mean it won’t work. And at that point he has gone too far. To my reading, Bell is not denying the virgin birth of Christ; however, he’s clearly leaving the door open. This is a problem, a big problem. I think the virgin birth is one of the essentials of the faith that we simply must hold to. (Side note: Mark Driscoll addressed this pretty directly back in September at the Desiring God 2006 conference.) So Bell loses bigtime points with me on that issue.

Secondly, I have some queasiness with Bell’s discussion about interpreting the Scripture. His basic argument is that Scripture has to be interpreted; that much I agree with. He ridicules people who will say “let me tell you what the Bible says”, saying that they’re just trying to sell you their interpretation. I guess I’m OK with all that. Where I start to get uneasy is when he encourages his readers to continue reinterpreting everything. He seemed to come dangerously close to saying that there isn’t necessarily a “right” interpretation of any Scripture, that we should just use the interpretation that makes sense to us. I don’t think he actually said that, but he seems to be oriented that direction. That bothers me a bit. As Christians we can’t be so postmodern that we refuse to say there’s a “correct” way to view the truth… that just won’t work.

Other than that, I didn’t have any huge problems with Velvet Elvis, but at the same time I didn’t find it that compelling. Sorry, Heather, wish I could give it a better rating, but I just didn’t come away from it very excited. Maybe I’ll have to try it again another time.

Finally I complete another entry on my reader-suggested reading list: Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell. Thanks Heather for the recommendation!

I’m having a harder time writing a review for this book than I have for any of the previous ones I’ve read. I’m not too sure what my conclusion is yet. Some general observations are in order, though.

First, I’m not too keen on the general writing style. The book is full of single sentences masquerading as paragraphs. Now, these aren’t long, Pauline run-on sentences; these are short, one line sentences with lots of white space between them. As a consequence, to me the book sounds less like a well-reasoned argument for something and more like a collection of little thoughts that don’t necessarily connect so well. Maybe I’m just too old to get it.

Second, I haven’t seen Rob Bell’s NOOMA videos. I’ve heard they’re pretty good, and they might clue me in on a little more of what he’s thinking. I haven’t heard any other of Bell’s stuff, either, so all I have to base my understanding of him on is this book.

There were a couple things that I disagreed with in there. First of all, towards the beginning of the book he goes through this extended illustration about how doctrines are like the springs on a trampoline - how they serve to propel us and our faith and our actions. Fine, I guess, OK. But then he goes on to argue that, hey, even if you’re missing a spring, that doesn’t mean that the trampoline won’t work. I’m starting to get a little queasy with the illustration at that point. Then he says, hey, so if the virgin birth doesn’t happen to be true, that spring pops off the trampoline, that doesn’t mean it won’t work. And at that point he has gone too far. To my reading, Bell is not denying the virgin birth of Christ; however, he’s clearly leaving the door open. This is a problem, a big problem. I think the virgin birth is one of the essentials of the faith that we simply must hold to. (Side note: Mark Driscoll addressed this pretty directly back in September at the Desiring God 2006 conference.) So Bell loses bigtime points with me on that issue.

Secondly, I have some queasiness with Bell’s discussion about interpreting the Scripture. His basic argument is that Scripture has to be interpreted; that much I agree with. He ridicules people who will say “let me tell you what the Bible says”, saying that they’re just trying to sell you their interpretation. I guess I’m OK with all that. Where I start to get uneasy is when he encourages his readers to continue reinterpreting everything. He seemed to come dangerously close to saying that there isn’t necessarily a “right” interpretation of any Scripture, that we should just use the interpretation that makes sense to us. I don’t think he actually said that, but he seems to be oriented that direction. That bothers me a bit. As Christians we can’t be so postmodern that we refuse to say there’s a “correct” way to view the truth… that just won’t work.

Other than that, I didn’t have any huge problems with Velvet Elvis, but at the same time I didn’t find it that compelling. Sorry, Heather, wish I could give it a better rating, but I just didn’t come away from it very excited. Maybe I’ll have to try it again another time.

• Sandbox ? plaintxt.org
  a place to start developing a Wordpress theme. thanks, Geof!
  (tags: wordpress blog design)
• Geek to Live: Manage multiple Firefox profiles
  Lifehacker shows us how to run two instances of Firefox at the same time with different profiles. Awesome.
  (tags: firefox tips)

I stopped at the library yesterday afternoon to pick up a book I had reserved. (Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell, yes, Heather, I’m finally getting around to reading it.) And of course, even with my book backlog, I couldn’t stop with just that one book - I had to pick up two more while I was at it. My book pile next to my bed has gotten large. Very large. From memory, here’s what’s sitting there waiting to be read:

• This is Your Brain on Music - Daniel Levitin - a fascinating book about how our brains deal with and remember music. I’m about 2/3 done with this one.
• Submarines: A History - I forget the author. I started this one before I bought the previous title. It’s in progress as well.
• Traitor - Stephen Coonts - I enjoy Coonts, this appears to be his latest.
• Velvet Elvis - Rob Bell - Just picked it up. This will be the next one I start.
• The Ragtime Club? - some random novel I picked up yesterday, deals with Scott Joplin and the ragtime music scene. Looks mildly interesting.
• Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin - my mom recommended this one. Should be interesting.
• The Republic - Plato - picked this one up with a Christmas gift card.
• The Everlasting Man - G. K. Chesterton - This one is in progress as well - good stuff, but slow going.
• Beyond All Earthly Powers - David Wells - a freebie for attending the Desiring God 2006 conference.
• Lectures to my Students - Spurgeon - Bought at the DG2006 conference, read the first few chapters, it’s still sitting there.
• Looking Unto Jesus - Isaac Ambrose - my dad gave me this one a couple of years ago - I have started on it several times and never finished. Slow going, but good stuff.

There may be a few others, that’s just all I can think of for now. If you haven’t seen it already, I’m keeping a list of all the books I finish this year. The link is on my sidebar, too.

[Checked tonight when I got home - found I’d missed a couple: What I Saw At The Revolution by Peggy Noonan and Case Closed by Gerald Posner. I guess I’ve got even *more* reading to do. :sigh:

I stopped at the library yesterday afternoon to pick up a book I had reserved. (Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell, yes, Heather, I’m finally getting around to reading it.) And of course, even with my book backlog, I couldn’t stop with just that one book - I had to pick up two more while I was at it. My book pile next to my bed has gotten large. Very large. From memory, here’s what’s sitting there waiting to be read:

• This is Your Brain on Music - Daniel Levitin - a fascinating book about how our brains deal with and remember music. I’m about 2/3 done with this one.
• Submarines: A History - I forget the author. I started this one before I bought the previous title. It’s in progress as well.
• Traitor - Stephen Coonts - I enjoy Coonts, this appears to be his latest.
• Velvet Elvis - Rob Bell - Just picked it up. This will be the next one I start.
• The Ragtime Club? - some random novel I picked up yesterday, deals with Scott Joplin and the ragtime music scene. Looks mildly interesting.
• Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin - my mom recommended this one. Should be interesting.
• The Republic - Plato - picked this one up with a Christmas gift card.
• The Everlasting Man - G. K. Chesterton - This one is in progress as well - good stuff, but slow going.
• Beyond All Earthly Powers - David Wells - a freebie for attending the Desiring God 2006 conference.
• Lectures to my Students - Spurgeon - Bought at the DG2006 conference, read the first few chapters, it’s still sitting there.
• Looking Unto Jesus - Isaac Ambrose - my dad gave me this one a couple of years ago - I have started on it several times and never finished. Slow going, but good stuff.

There may be a few others, that’s just all I can think of for now. If you haven’t seen it already, I’m keeping a list of all the books I finish this year. The link is on my sidebar, too.

[Checked tonight when I got home - found I’d missed a couple: What I Saw At The Revolution by Peggy Noonan and Case Closed by Gerald Posner. I guess I’ve got even *more* reading to do. :sigh:

I understand from reading the news that President Bush gave the State of the Union address back on Tuesday night. I skipped it. I actually even avoided it - when I turned the TV on, it was in progress. I flipped to ESPN. This is a departure for me. I have long held great interest in State of the Union (let’s just call them SOTU for short) speeches. When I was in high school I used my boom box to record them off the radio onto a cassette so I could listen to them again later. In past years I have sat with rapt attention to the network of my choice and had a thrill of excitement as the Sergeant-at-Arms would walk in and declare, “Mister Speaker, the President of the United States!”. But not this year.

I have become disenchanted with politics these days. Not uninterested, mind you; nor would I say that they are unimportant. But I have become disappointed with all of my political leaders and the very system that they operate in. I am not excited about any of the political topics they are pushing. Gone are the days when I thought they might actually do something about Social Security reform. Gone are the hopes that some serious income tax reform might be in the works. Now we’re supposed to get excited about a higher minimum wage and even more money for education and social programs.

I have long been a supporter of President Bush. The first ballot I ever cast, back as a high-school student in Texas, included a vote for him to be Governor of Texas. I have voted for him twice in presidential elections. He’s made some decisions I’ve been very happy with. (Nominating John Roberts to the Supreme Court is one of my favorites.) But on fiscal and governance issues, he has disappointed me greatly. Gone are Reagan’s conservative ideals of less government, less spending, and lower taxes. Now we just have more programs. Gone are tightly-held ideals of less government regulation and free speech; we just sign McCain-Feingold and let the Supreme Court sort it out. And then there’s the war.

I haven’t written much about the war here. Initially I was in favor of it. I don’t really want to debate that case here now; I thought the president presented a compelling case, and it was good for us to go get rid of Saddam. But the mess we are in now seems more and more troubling. The sad part is that I don’t see a good exit strategy. I’m not convinced that sending more troops will help subdue things and finish off the war. (I’m not saying it won’t, I’m just not convinced that it will.) But cutting and running isn’t a viable option, either. At this point, I’m about out of ideas, other than to pray for wisdom for the leadership and safety for the troops.

I don’t know what it’s going to take to get me excited about political goings-on again. I’d like to see a real conservative candidate from the Republican party for the 2008 election. If there were some real conservative principles championed, rather than just “my programs will be better than their programs”, maybe I’d be more interested. At least the Republicans have a better record on moral issues, though who knows how long that’ll last. The key difficulty here is that in our two-party system, my choice is either to vote for the Republican I’m unexcited about, or the Democrat I am even less excited about. And don’t start on me about third-party candidates - I know a wasted vote when I see one.

So this is probably as close as I’ll come on this blog to a political rant. Feel free to respond and interact. Tell me why I’m wrong (or right), and what suggestions you’d have for me. I am increasingly thankful that God’s priority is with individual hearts, not political influence.

I’ve not followed Fox’s drama 24 since the first season - I’m not sure why, I just haven’t. But this year I bit the bullet and set up a season pass on the Tivo. We just got around to watching the opening 2-hour show tonight. Amazing. I’m hooked.

• OpinionJournal - Peggy Noonan - Thoughts in advance of the State of the Union.
  “It’s been an era of soft thinking and hard words. Those who opposed the war were weak and craven; those who supported it were dupes and bullies; those who came to oppose the war were cowards bowing to polls; those who continue to support it love all war
  (tags: commentary Noonan politics)

Early this week I received notification that I was bumping my head on the disk space ceiling of my current web host. It wasn’t a very high ceiling, but it’s a friend that leases a server and provides small accounts to friends for very reasonable prices, so I wasn’t in a mood to complain. However, anticipating that my disk space needs would only increase, I decided to look around and see what other web hosting services were available.

My only real experience with a web hosting services to date has been with Lunarpages. I’ve administered the recminusa.org and brewedawakeningscr.com sites for a couple of years now, and Lunarpages has worked just fine. Their price is reasonable ($7/month), but to get that price they require a year’s payment up front… which is just more than I can afford right now. So, I looked around a bit more.

My Needs

My needs in a web host are fairly simple. Mostly I use my site for hosting blogs, so I need good MySql support. I need to be able to FTP my file changes up to the site. I want to be able to run a handful of email accounts. SSH access would be a nice bonus (some things are just much easier done via the command line!) but isn’t essential. Thus was my criteria in place for picking a new web host.

Attempt #1

My first exploration was with 1and1. They offer fantastically inexpensive rates for large amounts of disk space and bandwidth. They also advertised acceptable amounts of databases and email addresses. The best deal was their pricing: $2.50/month for the first six months, then up to $5/month after that, for 100 GB of storage and 1000 GB of bandwidth. They only required six months’ payment up front, so I went ahead and signed up. I was not impressed.

My first big complaint with 1and1 is their naming scheme for everything. Rather than get FTP accounts with reasonable names, they auto-assign you some terrible autogenerated alphanumeric codes. Ditto for the SQL databases. You’re not allowed to name your own; they create some awful names for you. And to top it off, they have no file manager at all. You have to just do everything via FTP. Unacceptable. 1and1 advertises a “90-day money back guarantee”. I’m going to take them up on it. Yesterday I tried calling to cancel, and after 15 minutes of hideous hold music I couldn’t take any more. I’ll try again today and see if I can get through.

Attempt #2

My second stop on the web-hosting quest was with Dot 5 Hosting. Their prices were similar to 1and1’s, but in comparison to 1and1’s horrible interface, they advertise a nicer control panel called “vDeck”. They offered packages that only required 3 months’ pay-ahead, and a similar 90-day guarantee, so I went ahead and signed up.

Strike 1 against Dot 5 hosting is that their control panel is on a non-standard IP port, which means it gets blocked by the firewall at my workplace. Given that I do most of my administration over the lunch hour, that was a big black mark. However, they sent me a nice email with my FTP login information (in plain english!), so I patiently waited until I got home, then started to try to administer things. Yes, they had a file manager. But one slight problem: they don’t give you an ability to unzip compressed files! This totally baffles me. Why on earth would you require your users to unzip and then FTP individual files up? What a waste. That was the show-stopper right there for me. Time to cancel again. Dot 5 offers live chat help, which actually worked pretty well. They told me I needed to send an email to cancel my service, so I sent the email, and I’m awaiting the cancellation confirmation. We’ll see how it goes.

In the end…

Finally I came to the conclusion that I need to just stay with my current provider for now. I’d been keeping Geof apprised of my search, and we worked something out to up my available disk space a bit. (Thanks, Geof!) So far, so good. Oh, and Geof allows me SSH access, which is something neither Dot 5 nor 1and1 would provide. I guess sometimes you just don’t know how good you’ve got it.

Early this week I received notification that I was bumping my head on the disk space ceiling of my current web host. It wasn’t a very high ceiling, but it’s a friend that leases a server and provides small accounts to friends for very reasonable prices, so I wasn’t in a mood to complain. However, anticipating that my disk space needs would only increase, I decided to look around and see what other web hosting services were available.

My only real experience with a web hosting services to date has been with Lunarpages. I’ve administered the recminusa.org and brewedawakeningscr.com sites for a couple of years now, and Lunarpages has worked just fine. Their price is reasonable ($7/month), but to get that price they require a year’s payment up front… which is just more than I can afford right now. So, I looked around a bit more.

My Needs

My needs in a web host are fairly simple. Mostly I use my site for hosting blogs, so I need good MySql support. I need to be able to FTP my file changes up to the site. I want to be able to run a handful of email accounts. SSH access would be a nice bonus (some things are just much easier done via the command line!) but isn’t essential. Thus was my criteria in place for picking a new web host.

Attempt #1

My first exploration was with 1and1. They offer fantastically inexpensive rates for large amounts of disk space and bandwidth. They also advertised acceptable amounts of databases and email addresses. The best deal was their pricing: $2.50/month for the first six months, then up to $5/month after that, for 100 GB of storage and 1000 GB of bandwidth. They only required six months’ payment up front, so I went ahead and signed up. I was not impressed.

My first big complaint with 1and1 is their naming scheme for everything. Rather than get FTP accounts with reasonable names, they auto-assign you some terrible autogenerated alphanumeric codes. Ditto for the SQL databases. You’re not allowed to name your own; they create some awful names for you. And to top it off, they have no file manager at all. You have to just do everything via FTP. Unacceptable. 1and1 advertises a “90-day money back guarantee”. I’m going to take them up on it. Yesterday I tried calling to cancel, and after 15 minutes of hideous hold music I couldn’t take any more. I’ll try again today and see if I can get through.

Attempt #2

My second stop on the web-hosting quest was with Dot 5 Hosting. Their prices were similar to 1and1’s, but in comparison to 1and1’s horrible interface, they advertise a nicer control panel called “vDeck”. They offered packages that only required 3 months’ pay-ahead, and a similar 90-day guarantee, so I went ahead and signed up.

Strike 1 against Dot 5 hosting is that their control panel is on a non-standard IP port, which means it gets blocked by the firewall at my workplace. Given that I do most of my administration over the lunch hour, that was a big black mark. However, they sent me a nice email with my FTP login information (in plain english!), so I patiently waited until I got home, then started to try to administer things. Yes, they had a file manager. But one slight problem: they don’t give you an ability to unzip compressed files! This totally baffles me. Why on earth would you require your users to unzip and then FTP individual files up? What a waste. That was the show-stopper right there for me. Time to cancel again. Dot 5 offers live chat help, which actually worked pretty well. They told me I needed to send an email to cancel my service, so I sent the email, and I’m awaiting the cancellation confirmation. We’ll see how it goes.

In the end…

Finally I came to the conclusion that I need to just stay with my current provider for now. I’d been keeping Geof apprised of my search, and we worked something out to up my available disk space a bit. (Thanks, Geof!) So far, so good. Oh, and Geof allows me SSH access, which is something neither Dot 5 nor 1and1 would provide. I guess sometimes you just don’t know how good you’ve got it.