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Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at http://www.amazon.com.

My work demands a lot of interpersonal contact, face-to-face, over-the-phone, and written. Recently I have moved the more intimate of these communications off the electronic impersonality of email and onto quality stationery. At the same time, I’ve bought two fountain pens, my first ever, combining this black Cross Century II with its silver-and-gold twin. One stays at the office and one by my writing desk here at home.

In the mix, I find that I’m discovering a new art form and means of personal expression. Always an illegible writer, the stationery and the fine pen slow me down just enough to realize that I actually *can* write. Continue Reading »

Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at http://www.amazon.com.

My work demands a lot of interpersonal contact, face-to-face, over-the-phone, and written. Recently I have moved the more intimate of these communications off the electronic impersonality of email and onto quality stationery. At the same time, I’ve bought two fountain pens, my first ever, combining this polished chrome Cross Century II with its black-and-gold twin. One stays at the office and one by my writing desk here at home. Continue Reading »

Among the constellation of golf magazines, Golf World is the one that isn’t straining to be a lifestyle magazine with golf thrown in. Continue Reading »

power: Romans 1

The apostle Paul’s letter to the Christians at Rome is a constitutional document of Christian faith. The product of formidable passion and intellect, this theological-pastoral treatise has become the locus of a handful of doctrinal fine points that shape that faith and provide grist for the theological mill that grinds on into the present time.

By the time Paul pens this letter, he can assume that his readers are familiar with the Greek term ‘euanggelion’. Usually translated as ‘the announcement of good news’ or simply ‘good news’, the term resonates on multiple levels throughout Greco-Roman culture. Perhaps its most pertinent use as precursor to the apostle’s employment of the term is that which designates the arrival of an emperor. Paul is able to refer to ‘the good news’, suggesting that by late in the first century it had become commonplace among Christians to refer to the arrival of Jesus Christ and the proclamation of his achievements as the euanggelion par excellence. Continue Reading »

Debby Boone comes across on this CD as one classy lady, from the stunning cover photo to the lush alto with which she handles a tenspot of well-selected traditional hymns. The orchestration is what you’d expect from a member of the Boone family: expert, spare with occasional flourishes, from time to time a jostling with the edge of Toomuchness, arrangements that are satisfying without being remarkable. Continue Reading »

Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at www.amazon.com.

Rivers of Joy, a live worship CD recorded in Colorado Springs and led by Don Moen, features a highly-trained Big Choir, an interesting solo or two, audience participation, and the appearance of spontaneity. Continue Reading »

‘Funny how different things look from up close.

Three years ago my family and I left a sixteen-year stint in Costa Rica, a place we loved and where we believed we’d one day die and be buried. Of all places, we came to Indianapolis, a town with a reputation for dullness placed smack in the middle of the nation’s Heartland. We have no Midwestern roots and so accepted by default the conventional wisdom that we were coming to a bland place for the sake of a great job.

How wrong we were! Continue Reading »

Rosie the deer

The Rhodesian Ridgeback, an African canine breed that was once used to hunt lions, is normally not associated with the phrase ‘like a little deer’. But Rosie, our five-year-old Ridgeback looks just like that as she sleeps, curled up on the rug she’s wrestled into just the right mound of folds and wrinkles that make it her bona fide napping place, looks just like that. Continue Reading »

Fido, come home!

The latest entry on my technological almost-too-good-to-be-true list is a service that links would be pet-adopters with dogs and cats desperately in need of a home like theirs. Check out www.1-800-save-a-pet.com.

You sign up to receive information about a specific kind of adoptable pet, say a Labrador Retriever. You also input your zip code on the assumption that you’d rather travel 7 miles to pick up little Fido than, say seventy-seven. After that, it’s simple. You receive emails with the name and description of adorable little guys and gals that very much need your love and stability. Continue Reading »

Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at www.amazon.com.

House and Garden is a big, beautiful, in-your-face collection of colors and designs for the well-heeled reader without children in diapers or other unstylish impediments to the concept of home as castle. Continue Reading »