Nathan runs St Eutychus. He loves Jesus. His wife. His daughter. His son. His other daughter. His dog. Coffee. And the Internet. He is the pastor of City South Presbyterian Church, a church in Brisbane, a graduate of Queensland Theological College (M. Div) and the Queensland University of Technology (B. Journ). He spent a significant portion of his pre-ministry-as-a-full-time-job life working in Public Relations, and now loves promoting Jesus in Brisbane and online. He can't believe how great it is that people pay him to talk and think about Jesus. If you'd like to support his writing financially you can do that by giving to his church.
Comically Vintage is probably worthy of its own tumblrweed post. But in a chicken v egg situation I feel compelled to offer this single serving of that single serving tumblr.
I shared this on Twitter a while back, but forgot to blog it. How remiss of me. A colouring in book for the executive types. A great way to kickstart your career, or at least to catalyse it. Buzz words that render the difference between sentences essentially meaningless are another part of this process.
It is pretty excellent, and there are more pages here (including evidence that it is a real book, or at least a convincing fake).
What would Jesus Tweet. It’s an important question for any would be Christian Confucius out there looking to use Facebook or Twitter as a platform for spiritual warfare.
Here’s a not very funny or self aware song that ponders a similar question… (via JesusNeedsNewPR)
It’s weird that when old people try to be hip and cool they use images of Dell desktop PCs from about 10 years ago in their hip, cutting edge, satire.
But that’s neither here nor there. This is a public service announcement for those out there who:
a) think posting one liners worthy of a church sign is of some benefit.
b) can’t come up with their own pithy one liners, you know, by reading the Bible.
c) want to use Facebook to annoy their friends, both Christian and non-Christian, rather than to bolster real relationships.
If you are that person, then rest easy. Here is a website that is a suppository of options, you can pull them out of your… ChristianStatusUpdates.com…
Here’s a sampling from today…
“____ The best way to start any day off right is to tell God how thankful you are.
____ P.U.S.H.> (P)ray (U)ntil (S)omething (H)appens
____ is strong because I know my weaknesses. I am wise because I know I’ve been foolish. I laugh because I’ve known sadness.
____ Don’t pass judgment on someone else’s life without looking at your own life first…
____ You know it’s grace when God gives you something you don’t deserve.”
Here’s the Thing is a quite brilliant web series that reduces the lives of every day people into the signature things that they own, via a commentated photographic tour of their household. Thanks to the awesome crowd sourcing power of Kickstarter the Here’s the Thing team will be touring the United States.
So what are your things? While I don’t buy into the idea that you are defined by your possessions, it is interesting to think about the impression the odds and ends in your house make about your character. This is the reason I used to take a cursory glance at bookshelves and CD collections (before the age of internet distribution) to get a feel for a person.
I think a tour of my life via our house would include the wedding picture on our wall, my bookshelves, littered with Bibles, theology books, and novels, my laptop and Apple gadgets, an array of coffee paraphernalia, our pets, the musical instruments that Robyn plays, but I don’t, and our litany of kitchen gadgetry useful for creating just about every dish known to man, but largely pulled out upon a whim. Then it would be my series of novelty hats from around the globe, my plastic Bob Hawke head drink dispenser, and whatever other items of kitsch have survived decluttering bouts over the years.
I don’t have a green thumb. By some miracle the coffee pot plant I bought 18 months ago has seemingly died and been resurrected multiple times since I purchased it, other pot plants have not fared so well. My gardens have been full of dead things for as long as I can remember. Including multiple dead pets (mostly birds… mostly finches… mostly dead in one day… well, 12 of them). Anyway. Should these dead flora and fauna ever plan to come back to haunt me, this gnome (available from Etsy) will provide all the leadership they need.
Wendi Deng’s amazing boxing skills notwithstanding, this is probably the only real legacy of Rupert Murdoch’s “I don’t know, I wasn’t told” appearance in Britain last week.
I love books. Physical books. I like reading on my kindle, and even more on my iPad. But the tactile experience of a book, and the visual thrill of a well-stocked set of shelves will keep me heading to second hand bookshops, the book depository, and whatever physical bookshop is still solvent after this year.
Turning books into lamps is now old hat. Well. I saw these ones a while ago. I meant to post them, but then I forgot. The light comes on when the book is opened.
I love these ones for the steampunk bulbs. I can’t imagine they’d be cheap to replace if you kicked a soccer ball, or a shoe, or some sort of miscellaneous projectile into it.
Like the rest of evangelical Australia I’m a bit of a John Lennox fan at the moment. His turn on Q&A last week was a masterful attempt at presenting the gospel graciously in a relatively combative adversarial format. Those critical of his content (and I’ve seen a couple of Christians suggesting he could have answered a couple of questions better) should pay heed to the format, and the way both Eva Cox and the ABC’s moderator Virginia Trioli were keen to jump in on him before he could finish answering their questions. He articulated the need for forgiveness and the intellectual legitimacy of a God who intervenes in creation in a personal and relational way. I thought he did a stellar job. I thought Virginia Trioli’s banging on about circular reasoning was a little bit annoying because truth will essentially be self authenticating and circular, circular reasoning is a fallacy, but it’s not a defeater.
Anyway. Here’s John Lennox on a topic I wrote an essay about this semester.
There’s something irresistible about this video, maybe it’s the matching colours. Maybe it’s the bright house. Maybe it’s the incongruous dog. I don’t know. It’s certainly not the worst or weirdest Christian music on YouTube.
Nor is this, which apart from the ghostly severed heads is pretty cute.
I don’t know if the last bit of that heading is true. What is true is that somebody put together a pretty awesome replica of the Iron Man suit Tony Stark built in his desert captivity.
According to this little write up of the process – he took 100 days to pull off this amazing feat. And he started with just pliers and a stanley knife. And of course, some inspiration…
