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Rowland Croucher

Rowland Croucher has written 26185 posts for John Mark Ministries
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Death and dying

On October 18, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

By Alan Matheson… A couple of thoughtful articles on dying: * “Good intentions lead to bad deaths”,The Australian 17.10.11         http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/health-science/doctors-good-intentions-lead-to-bad-deaths/story-e6frg8y6-1226168013266 * “Advance care planning & end –  of – life”, The Medical Journal of Australia 2011;195 (8):435-436 Editorial,         http://www.mja.com.au/public/issues/195_08_171011/sil10913_fm.html The MJA Editorial (above) has a link to “Advance Care Planning:If your choices for future health care […]

Fear and Faith (Richard Rohr)

On October 18, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

One could sum up the Bible as an interplay of fear and faith. In general, people are obsessed and overpowered by fears; they fear what they cannot control. God is one of our primary fears because God is totally beyond us. The good news, the gospel, according to Luke, is that God has breached that […]

Humor

On October 16, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

A police officer was investigating an accident on a two-lane, narrow road in which the drivers had hit virtually head-on. One driver, an extremely elderly woman, kept repeating, “He wouldn’t let me have my half of the road!” After gathering as much information as possible, he angrily approached the other driver, who was examining his […]

Forgiveness (Richard Rohr)

On October 16, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

You could say that among the most powerful of human experiences is to give or to receive forgiveness. Much of Jesus ¢â‚¬â„¢ teaching is directly or indirectly about this mystery of forgiveness, God breaking God ¢â‚¬â„¢s own rules. That ¢â‚¬â„¢s not surprising, because forgiveness is probably the only human action that reveals  three goodnesses  simultaneously! When we forgive, we choose […]

9 Things That Will Disappear In Our Lifetime

On October 14, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

  (Depends how long our lifetimes are) Whether these changes are good or bad depends in part on how we adapt to them.       But, ready or not, here they come. 1.  The Post Office Get ready to imagine a world without the post office. They are so deeply in financial trouble that there is probably no […]

Richard Foster, Sanctuary of the Soul: Journey Into Meditative Prayer (IVP, 2011)

On October 14, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

Contemporary culture, writes our (Quaker) author,  ¢â‚¬Ëœis good at training us in almost everything and anything ¢â‚¬ ¦ except prayer ¢â‚¬â„¢. His opening quote is from Elizabeth O ¢â‚¬â„¢Connor:  ¢â‚¬ËœChurches have no courses on meditation, despite the fact that it is an art that must be learned from those who have mastered it, and despite the fact that the […]

COMPUTER PASSWORDS

On October 14, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

Jottings from a good article in the Melbourne Age’s Green Guide by Charles Wright (Sept 29, 2011): * One commonly available ‘password guesser’ can recover 24% of all passwords by using just 100,000 combinations: it can test several hundred thousand passwords in a second * The free open-source Password Safe site (bit.ly/1tqNES) helps you keep […]

Derek Tidball: Preacher, keep yourself from idols (IVP 2011)

On October 13, 2011 ⋅ 2 comments

For the last half-century every decade has witnessed the publication of a landmark book on the art of preaching. From memory, roughly in chronological order: W E Sangster ¢â‚¬â„¢s  The Craft of the Sermon;  James Stewart ¢â‚¬â„¢s  Heralds of God  (he was selected by Preaching Magazine as the 20th  century ¢â‚¬â„¢s greatest English-language preacher), John Stott ¢â‚¬â„¢s  I Believe in Preaching,  John Claypool ¢â‚¬â„¢s  The Preaching Event  (he ¢â‚¬â„¢s the […]

Why the Black Death was the mother of all plagues

On October 13, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

Updated  October 13, 2011 PHOTO:  Deadly plague: An illustration of the Black Death from the Toggenburg Bible, 1411  (Wikipedia) Plague germs extracted from medieval corpses in a London cemetery have shed light on why the bacterium that unleashed the Black Death was so lethal and spawned later waves of epidemics. The DNA of Yersinia pestis shows, in evolutionary […]

Humo[u]r

On October 13, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

Two overweight middle-aged women are on their daily walk. They were discussing how hard it is to lose weight as one gets older. One woman complained that she remained apple-shaped. The other woman said that no matter how much she exercised, there was too much fat on her backside and thighs, and it seemed like […]

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