I think I've fixed the issue with Bloglines not always displaying all the posts in the Thinklings RSS feed. The problem was, as far as I can tell, undue finickyness on Bloglines' part regarding the structures allowed in one of the XML tags in the feed. This has been fixed.

If anyone out there uses Bloglines to read Thinklings, can you let me know if the feed looks good to you now?

The fix will be going out in the next general release of Bloo.

Update - well, it's still ignoring the posts entered today. Not sure why but I'll continue doping this out.

Update 2 - actually, it seems to be working very well now. Check that one off the list!

We're putting together a blog tour for the book (tentatively scheduled for first week in August), and while some copies have already been assigned, I've got some left over. (21 to be exact.)

If you're interested in participating in the blog tour, email (1) your name, (2) your blog name, and (3) your blog url to jaredcwilson AT yahoo DOT com.

Fine Print:

As I said, the number of slots open is limited to 21, so there's no guarantees in the (unlikely?) case of overwhelming response. But you never know. :-) (Btw, if we kinda sorta know each other in the blog world, chances are that your name is already on the list for an invite, but feel free to check.)

If your blog is selected, I'll contact you via email for your preferred mailing address, and then you'll receive a free copy of the book after its release in July. The only catch is you have to post a review of the book on your blog on your assigned day in the week of the tour. It doesn't even have to be a positive review. :-)

In lieu of a review, I'd be happy to answer a few interview questions for you, provided you send them to me well in advance and you of course mention the book and display a picture of the cover.

I can answer further questions and concerns via email.
So let me know if you're interested in participating!

(If you're not interested in the blog tour but would still like a shot at getting a free copy, join the fan page for the book on Facebook or follow me on Twitter. I will be doing random drawings from those lists as soon as I've got copies to give away.)

No, not this one (especially not these days) . . .

I'm asking the question: What's the best blog you read, and why?

I read a couple of blogs. Not many. Some encourage me. Most just shake me up. I'm wondering if there are any gems out there I'm missing.

So, what's the best blog you know, and why do you like it? I'm looking for something new.

Leave your suggestion in the comments. Thanks!

I've always known Michael was a great writer. Looks like some promising things are happening.

[T]wo weeks ago, the phone rang and a young man in Boston asked to edit three of my pieces into an opinion piece on the op/ed of the Christian Science Monitor.
A week ago yesterday, he published it in print and on line.
Within 4 hours, it was on Drudge.
In the week since, the column has been everywhere in the media, and I have 12 interviews done or in process, with everyone from CNN to the Moody Network to a local Christian station.
Over 800 people posted comments or sent emails.

Two of them were literary agents.

One called today.

If this day ever came, I had two things I wanted. 1) I wanted to write about Jesus Shaped Spirituality and 2) I wanted someone to see my writing as marketable somewhere outside of the usual Christian market.

The first things I heard today were these two things. Both of them. Exactly.

Perhaps the last two years were moving me somewhere; somewhere I couldn’t go otherwise. Maybe this was God’s long road to take me where he wanted me to go.

Now I have an opportunity. An opportunity I’ve dreamed of. An opportunity that has come to me completely from the grace of God.

What will happen next?

I just have to keep writing.

(Now if we could just get him to quit slumming over at that ramshackle pub down the street).

When I first became aware of the blogosphere I thought it was a great idea, though I had no idea how far it would spread. I love reading opinion, and I remember, way back in the day, devouring the op-ed pages of the newspaper. The blogosphere is an op-ed page times infinity, basically, and you can find as much opinion as you want. You can drink opinion until you burst.

My interest in the blogosphere became wedded to my interest in technology and programming, and thus, coming out of a conversation at an EntMoot in late 2002, the Thinklings was born. It wasn't long until I was writing blog software meself.

The blogosphere, in other words, keeps me pretty busy.

But I wonder . . . is the blogosphere a worthwhile pursuit? Three of my four kids blog as well, and are bombarded with the avalanche of opinion too. I hadn't planned on that (it didn't cross my mind, frankly) in 2003, but they are now teenagers and one almost out of his teens. I have wondered if, on balance, it was better when I was their age and we didn't have the internet complicating our lives. (Jill and I stalk their blogs and facebook pages, of course :-).

The first huge blogospheric brou-ha-ha I was exposed to occurred around Thanksgiving, 2004. Unfortunately and grievously, it was a huge, public, multi-blog slander-fest between people who will all stand as adopted sons and brothers before the same Lord and Redeemer one day. It was ugly. I didn't know that kind of ugly could happen in the blogosphere. It shook me.

Some blogs I read are very edifying. Others are not. Many of them have negative things to say about the church (this is the Christian blogosphere I'm referring to). Some are full of snark. Some are full of complaints. Of course, many of the complaints are valid. But I wonder how effective complaining on a blog is. Many blogs set themselves against each other. And much of what you can read is unrestrained. The internet is the one place one can be both a bully and a coward at the same time.

I recently had someone very dear to me tell me that the Thinklings has made her less enthusiastic about studying the Bible. I think her reasoning is along the lines of "what's the use? I won't be able to arrive at a firm conviction without soon reading that others disagree, or think people who hold that conviction are naive, or dislike (and ridicule) the Bible study author, etc." That shook me too.

Through the blogosphere I've found that a lot of things I thought were helpful or benign are seen as great dangers by others. People I've admired from my past (James Dobson, Max Lucado, Beth Moore) are reviled. People who I had no firm opinion of, but who I admired for their talent and skill (Thomas Kinkade, and a host of very talented CCM artists, for example) are ridiculed, demeaned, and slandered. These people are all "part of the problem".

I wonder, sometimes, what would have happened to my new-found faith when I was 19 if the blogosphere had been invented then. If I had jumped into the Christian blogosphere as a new believer, would I have emerged intact?

Though I think I've remained the same guy in "real-space", I've found my blogospheric personality is not nearly as kind or patient as it once was. I've become more cynical, at least when expressing myself in HTML.

On the flipside, the blogosphere has been huge in maintaining dear friendships, has gained me new friends, and has made me think, and think deeply. This hard work of thinking has helped me have a much better grasp of theology than I had before. As my faith in humans has waned, my faith, trust and hope in God has increased. I'm thankful and hopeful that there will not be a blogosphere in Heaven :-).

I think that in many cases the blogosphere has become a great avenue for reform in the church, and that gives me great hope. The blogosphere has given some of my real-life friends and blog friends a venue for sharing their excellent thoughts and superb writing skills with the world, almost for free. I've been able to get a peek into my kids' inner thoughts, and have been able to observe, over their shoulders as it were, their struggles and triumphs.

There are blogs I read that edify, encourage, and challenge me greatly.

In total, I'm hard-pressed to tell whether this phenomenon of the blogosphere has, on balance, been a good or bad thing.

It's something I've been wondering about. A lot.

This site is hosted on Hosting Matters. I've tried out a number of hosting servers over the years and Hosting Matters has consistently provided good service and well-performing servers.

Tonight I had an emergency problem, caused, unfortunately, by a difference in how the latest version of PHP interacts with Bloo . . . something to fix . . . Hosting matters resolved the problem by moving this site to another server still running with the prior version of PHP.

They did it very quick. And that was pretty cool of them.

I'm a happy customer. Just wanted you to know.

Just upgraded Thinklings to Bloo version 1.15. The upgrade went smooth, as far as I can tell.

You shouldn't notice much difference. It will just emanate that much more awesomeness. . .

A Nashville pastor posted a workplace security video on his blog (found on YouTube) of a worker freaking out in the office and vandalizing things and people. He mercilessly hits another man in the head and throws a computer across the aisle where it hits a woman in the head. Later, as the attacker is still wreaking havoc, another lady is tending to the woman's head wound.

The video is pretty disturbing and gave me the willies. And I'm a dude who loves action movies and boxing and the occasional MMA match.
But it was like watching a school shooting video or something. Not cool.

The reason the pastor gave for posting this was as an "illustration" against what the church's sermon series on work/career was trying to prevent.

I commented and respectfully suggested he rethink whether it was wise to post.
Another lady said she was disturbed by it.

Others were pretty blase.
One person said it was "fascinating."
One guy said it was in the running for his "best video of the week."

What planet am I on?

I'd like to point you to a new feature here on Thinklings. In the left navbar you can see a link entitled "View Posts From Our Blogroll". If you click on this link, you will see the most recent 50 posts from the excellent stable of bloggers that inhabit our blogroll.

This is accomplished via the "Bloogroll Posts" Extension SnapOn (comes with the core release of Bloo).

Feel free to peruse the posts from our blogroll whenever things get a bit stale here on Thinklings. Happy surfing!

Nevertheless she will be saved in childbearing if they continue in faith, love, and holiness, with self-control.
-- 1 Timothy 2:15

I really like my wife's comments on this passage. I thought some of you might be edified by what she wrote as well.

Our good friend Stroke has a new blog (and it's a Bloo blog too. Wayne and Garth say "Excellent").

Check out The Wilsonian Institute.

New Gospel-Driven Church video blog:

The Reconcilable Difference

This one's shorter and kinda sorta PG-13.

Wow. This day the long-absent (or mostly absent) Jared, hub of the Thinklings wheel, decides to lay down more than one post, and the blog freaking EXPLODES with comments. It was hard to keep up today!

I've posted my first "vlog" at Gospel-Driven Church. You can watch it here.

It's longer and rougher than I'd like (I recorded it at one a.m. this morning after much feasting and merriment with friends, and it was pretty much all off the top of my head), but I'll probably start trying to do one a week over there, hopefully improving on the pithiness and quality. :-)

Let me know what you think!

For years Dan Edelen over at Cerulean Sanctum has been warning about a financial meltdown in the U.S. I admit that I, cockeyed optimist that I am, have in the past thought that he (and most other economy naysayers) were taking too dim a view of things.

Well, it looks like I was wrong. I don't know how bad or how long the current downturn/recession/depression will be, but I have to give Dan his props. He was right.

Read his latest when you get a chance: Meltdown, U.S.A.

But only because I went to a church for almost ten years that pretty much had this pastor.

More Excerpts from The 417 Rules of Awesomely Bold Leadership: Use Words and Spell Things with Them

Rule #62 -- Empower Through "D-N-A"

...and when I showed him my Harley, I think he re-considered what faith is all about.

The point is, Leaders may lead through vision, but Leading Leaders lead through empowering people to share the Leader's vision. We do this through what I call "DNA", which stands for "Delegation-n-Acronyms". You can't have one without the other.

First: Delegate. Then: Unleash an unending blizzard of acronyms.

What makes a great acronym? I use this simple way to remember:

A -- Awesome

C -- Can-Do

R -- Relentless

O -- Othoritative

N -- Not un-awesome

Y -- (Fill this in later)

M -- Manly

S -- Synergistismic

Friends, as I once told a small group including Czech President Vaclav Havel and Vince McMahon of the WWE: Leadership is about one thing: Vision. But Awesomely Bold Leadership is Leadership Plus Vision. And what is more powerful, friends, than Leadership Plus Vision Raised to the Power of Spelling Things Out with Other Words? Probably nothing, my friends, and that's why I...

-----------------------

Rule #398 -- Leave a Legacy of Awesomeness in Leadership

...so General Powell looked at me, his eyes welling, and said, yes, sure, there are leaders. But who is leading them?

Then he realized that okay, there are lot of people doing that. But who is leading those people, the ones who are doing that?

Well, yeah, some people are doing that. But -- and here was his real question -- who is leading THEM?

Well, I am.

But here's another question, friends: Who is going to reach the next generation of leaders, and empower them to be led by someone awesome? We have a crisis here. Who will lead leading leaders when I die?

Answer: My books and CD's, that's who.

And my tapes, and some of these younger guys I allow to speak at my conferences. These men are revolutionizing leadership by doing everything exactly the same way, but they're doing everything the exact same way with their shirts half untucked, sometimes tattoos, and they say things like "off the chain" a lot.

New generations require new approaches. And here's my new approach: Good ol' fashioned Awesomely Bold Leadership. Awesome is as awesome does, and if that means changing a name of a church from "First Baptist Church" to "The Bizzle Chizzle", I'm all for it, so long as we have a gifted man on stage, and...

Hilarious and incisive.

This stuff is barely parody these days.
The pastor I sat under rode a Harley (and wanted everyone to know about it, to the point that he even rode up onto the stage at the same kids' building fundraising event where he suggested people sell their cars or refinance their homes to give proceeds to the building fund) AND was (and is) irrationally acronym obsessed.

From a recent commenter:

"This blog is so pretentious. Its not what CS Lewis and his mates did in their time is it?

May God spare us all from our own arrogance."

Our Friend Jen is pregnant.

Our ears our burning.

And Sufjan Stevens? What kind of name is that? Is he American Taliban?

Saw this post on Francis Chan's video blog yesterday and it really challenged me.



I don't know if I'm totally sold on the logic as a mandate (Chan himself does not save for emergencies or retirement), but I am totally sold on the spirit behind it.