RootsRain

Now that I have everybody squealing with little giggles.

So I changed my blog theme. I really liked the simple white theme I had before (and I can quickly switch back), but I decided to try something darker and more involved. I combed through WordPress themes for about 2 hours and never found anything completely to my liking, so I dismantled Rob Goodlatte’s Abstractia theme.

So vote and let me know what you think. Should I:

1. Keep this theme?
2. Switch back?
3. Keep looking?

Update: Okay, so the “Jeff this was a horrible mistake”s have it. The site is once again its pristine self. Click here for an image of the old version.

To all my design… umm… homies… Turner has a job opening for an interactive designer, if you’re in the market.

See the position on Creative HotList.

I’ve tried over and over for several years to stick to a Bible-reading plan where I’d get through the Bible in a year. But somewhere around Leviticus or I Chronicles I stall and peter out.

This year I found something that has really helped. It’s the ESV (English Standard Version) RSS feeds. There’s a whole set of different through-the-ESV-in-one-year feeds you can subscribe to that will send you each day’s Bible reading during the course of the year. There’s Chronological, Through the Bible, One Year Tract Bible, Outreach Bible, Every Day in the Word, and more. And each one lets you also listen to the selected passage so you could get your “reading” done while you’re getting ready. I was skeptical that I would hate reading on my computer (I normally do… I always prefer print), but I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how consistent this has helped me be.

Just get a handy RSS reader (I use Vienna on my Mac) and subscribe to one of the feeds.

After my post about giving, I was very interested to read this book. I’d just been through Randy Alcorn raking Christians (who tend to be conservatives) over the coals for their lack of interest in giving; I was wondering what recent statistical evidence says about giving patterns among conservatives in particular and Americans in general.

Who Really Cares? The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism may sound like a book exposing the failure of the American right to live up to their talk about being the ones who really care. It’s actually the opposite. But, thankfully, it’s not written by someone with an axe to grind against liberals. It was written by Albert Brooks, the Louis A. Bantle Professor of Business and Government Policy at Syracuse University. He’d been interested in charity research and, through his research into giving patterns, moved from being a liberal to a conservative and a Christian.

Defining “charity” as both monetary giving and volunteering, Brooks cross examines all kinds of data trying to figure out the question “What American demographic is most charitable?” His answer: religious people. It doesn’t matter much which religion, but religious people give far, far more in both money and time to charitable causes. And religious people strongly tend to be political conservatives. But let me just go through some comparative data: Read the rest of this entry »

Here it is. Now everyone can see Benjamin’s infectious laughter.

I might make this my most fascinating read of 2007. It’s a book I picked up a while ago when I was reading a bunch of books on business, leadership, and management but I never actually got around to reading it. I’m glad I finally wised up.

Influence: Science and Practice began as Dr. Robert Cialdini’s attempt to write a textbook, then turn it into a readable paperback, then just combine the two. Cialdini worked as a researcher into “compliance methods” before beginning his professorship of psychology at Arizona State. In his remarkable book, Influence, he explores six areas where people become incredibly compliant. They obey what he calls the click, whirr response: in response to certain stimuli, the tape clicks on, and the actions automatically play out.

For instance, the mortal enemy of the turkey is the polecat. Polecats steal turkey chicks and, if a mother turkey sees one, she’ll chase it down and tear it apart if she can. Researchers tried putting a stuffed polecat in the middle of some turkeys and the mother turkey instantly tore it to pieces. Next, they tried putting a stuffed polecat into the middle of the same group of turkeys with one difference: they put a tape recorder inside the polecat which played the cheep-cheep of the turkey chicks. The mother turkey accepted the polecat and even pulled it underneath her. When the tape recorder ran out of cheep-cheep sounds, the mother turkey instantly turned on the stuffed polecat.

The mother turkey exhibited an automatic response to a certain stimulus: when the cheeps happen, you nurture whatever is making the cheep sound. Cialdini contends that there are many things that trigger people’s automated responses as well—not with the perfect consistency of a turkey, but with astounding patterns. Cialdini divides these triggers up into six broad categories, each of which I’ll list here with a small sampling of the ways the book claims the principle shows up.

Read the rest of this entry »

I came across this link today telling how Sovereign Grace Ministries has opened up their entire MP3 library for free. This means excellent free resources for people like me who drive over 2 hours every day, listening to sermons. I’m positively giddy right now.

Thank you, Sovereign Grace, for making this available to everyone.

Get the MP3s here: Sovereign Grace Store