What a Difference Breathing Can Make!

After two months straight of daily blogging, I made the conscious decision to stop writing for about a week or so. In the interim, I've been reading a lot of stuff and breathing a lot of fresh air.

• After getting Jonathan Edwards' complete sermons onto my Kindle, I've been reading them at a rate of probably three a day, and it is one of the greatest things I could have ever done for myself. The Yale introductions are tremendous, as well. I especially enjoy the end of the introductions where they talk about the condition of the manuscripts that they took the sermons from.
• I put away a big chunk of John Calvin's Institutes. Of special interest to me was Calvin's arguments against images where he takes on the Council of Nicea. Fascinatingly, when it comes to the subject of art, he says that we should only make images of things that we can already see, and only for the purposes of education - not for pleasure or amusement.
• I have also been reading through Calvin's commentary on Psalm 19, and I have found it to be a tremendous boon to my own appreciation of David's writings. Anybody who was ever presented with the stereotype that Calvin was a heartless theologian with a belly of iron never met the man in these pages. In his Commentary on the Psalms, Calvin shows himself to be a big hearted, God-besoughted, deeply thoughtful pastor.
• For our Sunday School class (which I'm just sitting in on, not teaching), the high school seniors in our church are reading Greg Bahnsen's Pushing The Antithesis. We've just finished the preface and the introduction, but I am already pumped up and excited to do some major presuppositional apologizing. There is a strong likelihood that I will be blogging chapter by chapter as we read through and discuss the book. At an insanely generous discount of 1% off, I highly recommend that you get your copy from Westminster Bookstore (cue ironic smirk).
• I also want to to put in a plug for our church's audio resources. In addition to having Pastor Granberry's Sunday Sermons (which are tremendous demonstrations of Gospel preaching if ever there was any), they also are posting the audio from Rick & Ben Franks' Sunday School class. They are moving week by week through the subject of Church History.
• As you may be able to see, during the month of July, I managed to wrap up all of the crazy and interesting books that I was working on and which gave me so much fodder for blogging. As a partial result, July was an insanely popular time for our blog as we received over 6,000 visitors - no thanks in large part to Josh Walker's hilarious Three Amigos spoof.Since I don't simply want to write for the sake of writing, you may notice my rate of posting is slowing, but hopefully that results in quality over quantity. I was going to write something about Glenn Beck's emergence as the new Billy Graham, but instead I think I'll just debate with people about it on Facebook and save Bring the Books for quality stuff such as this meandering post.

Also, since Josh Walker is now in Canada studying the migratory patterns of Koine Greek speaking water geese under the tutelage of Dr. Stanley Porter, we will perhaps hear the occasional chirp from him regarding things that are far beyond my own level of comprehension. Lets hope, anyway.