I hate to do it, but I need to put Flotsam and Jetsam on hiatus for a while. I have a few other projects pressing, several of which you should be hearing about over the next few weeks. So I need to carve out a little extra space. I’ll still try to post interesting links and pictures on occasion, but F&J is going to hibernate at least until April.

Sorry for ruining your morning. Please don’t take your anger and frustration out on the people around you. They probably deserve it. But try not to do it anyway.

worst tip ever

Good Reads

• Always Mardi Gras and Never Easter: A cross-shaped Christianity might leave behind those seeking a civil religious cover for their wild Bacchus worship or their rigid Stoic legalism. But it might prompt a world gorged on riotous living to seek the more permanent things instead.

• Religion for Everyone: The decline of religion in the West has brought a decline in community spirit. Could the secular world draw useful lessons from religious life? Alain de Botton offers new ways to find shared meaning.

• Love Your (Theological) Enemies: I find it hard enough to love the people I agree with. So how can I love someone on the other side, especially when the things that divide us are theological principles that really matter?

• An Open Letter to Praise Bands: It seems to me that you are often simply co-opted into a practice without being encouraged to reflect on its rationale, its “reason why.” In other words, it seems to me that you are often recruited to “lead worship” without much opportunity to pause and reflect on the nature of “worship” and what it would mean to “lead.”

Good Reads

• The Forgotten Influence of Martin Luther: At the time of his death he left a world turned upside down. There were lifetimes of work left to be done, but Luther would have to leave it to be finished by those who would follow after him and carry on what he had started. Today, 466 years after that stroke, the voice of Luther still rings through the church.

• When Should a Leader Leave?: I would never pretend to know the will of God for leaders. Indeed I am reticent even to suggest these reasons lest someone grasp one or more and leave his or her position of leadership prematurely. Nevertheless I interviewed dozens of leaders I respect. One of the simple questions I asked them was: How did you know it was time to leave your previous position of leadership?

• Miracles in the Bible and Today: Most stunning to me on a personal level were sincere eyewitness claims from people that I or my wife have long known and trusted, including everything from cures of blindness to restoration from apparent death.

• The True Story of the First Crusade (NYT): That story, and the papal authority it underlined, shaped the next 500 years of European history. Even today, the idea at the center of the crusades, that religion has long been at the heart of the East-West divide, drives foreign policy from Washington to Islamabad. But the real story is much more complicated, and much more earthly, than most people recognize.