Blog

Business and…

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If you read the About Cerulean Sanctum tab at the top of the blog, you’ll eventually discover that I work from our home outside Cincinnati, Ohio, as a freelance business copywriter and copyeditor. The Web’s been devoid of that reality for quite some time.

I’ve struggled for about eighteen months attempting to get my biz site online. I wanted portal management software to create the site, Ethereal Pen Productionsbut I either got massive nuclear overkill or anemic, prissy code with an attitude. I committed to Joomla!, but its templating system favored graphic designers and code noodlers. With it perpetually in flux between two or three incompatible versions, I finally threw in the towel. In what must be considered massive irony and good fortune, version 2.1.x of WordPress included far better handling of static pages than previous versions (a former showstopper for me), so I took the plunge. The wraps came off the site yesterday. It still needs some tweaking, especially graphics-wise, but I like the lean look.

So, Ethereal Pen Productions finally lives on the Web. You’re invited to critique.

Better yet, if you need anything written, let me know. My kid needs braces.

And…

I’m still recovering from the blowback from Monday’s post, Dissing Discernment. I think all the principle players in the comments have made up. I know now not to juggle five things at once while replying to comments, so even this old diehard learned a few things from the whole conversation.

I didn’t know I was posting anything so controversial, but the whole topic’s a lightning rod. I suspect that’s one reason so few books on the topic exist. Tim Challies should sell a million copies when his discernment tome comes out. Or people will burn piles of it in the town square. You never know. (Maybe just in Canada. They’ve been testy ever since Gretzky fled.)

Whatever the case, blogging will be light in days ahead due to tax prep and deadlines on several writing assignments.

And…

If you’ve got a blog, check your bandwidth. I found a huge spike in my outgo this February. Lucky for me, I’m nowhere maxed out on my five domains. Still, Cerulean Sanctum drowned in bandwidth warning messages toward the end of last month, forcing me to re-apportion things.

So I did a little snooping and found something throttling my site: Yahoo! Slurp.

When I sent a message to Yahoo! asking about the sevenfold increase in the number of daily hits from them compared to the previous month, they told me they’d been experimenting with a plethora of new page-sucking bots and had been hitting some sites hard.

Well, no thank you very much! Fortunately for me, I’ve got some leeway. Nonetheless, their little experiment doubled my bandwidth outgo! (That’s not easy to do, either.) I can imagine that some sites that pay by the byte will receive a nasty little bill from Mr. Host courtesy of the crew from Sunnyvale. I guess the Yahooligans thought they could pick on me because I used to live there, but fled. (Heck, Gretzky got out of California, too!)

A heads up to all of you.

Be blessed…and be wary!

The Best of Cerulean Sanctum 2006

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Cerulean Sanctum logo

If any one theme marked 2006 here at Cerulean Sanctum, it’s that everything changes. This year marked a big transition from Blogger to WordPress, and all in all, it went fairly smoothly. Despite this, the pressure from five years of blogging finally caught up with me and I took a hiatus for six weeks.

In keeping with the kind of bad timing I seem to suffer from, the day after my hiatus started, The Wall Street Journal ran an article noting that bloggers who step away from their blogs risk losing their audience. I’ll leave it up to the five readers who stayed with me to determine whether that’s true or not! 😉

Despite fewer new posts than last year, I still managed to come up with enough decent ones to include here. I’ll let you all be the judges of whether or not these picks live up to their billing.

God bless you!

General Church Issues

The year got off to a bang with a series that tackled what the American Church can do to be effective in an age much different than even fifty years ago.

Do our churches preach messages that are impossible to live out? Are we putting millstones around people’s necks and offering no means of escape?

Ah, the missionary drops by the church to tell tales of other lands and peoples. Yet what he describes sounds nothing like church the way we do it here in America. When did we become the measure of all godliness?

Jesus didn’t come to found a loose band of disconnected individuals, but a vital community that has all things in common.

What are the issues today that hold us back from being the the kind of Church God desires?

Cerulean Sanctum is a blog that asks tough questions about the American Church and what it’s doing wrong. But what is it doing right?

What will it take for us to break down the man-made artifice within our churches that shoos unbelievers away?

The title of this two-parter says it all:

We’ve had small groups in the modern Evangelical Church for forty years. Where’s the fruit?

What it means to live out real community in our churches:

Evangelicals love a winner. But how do they treat a loser—especially when it’s them?

Lifestyle Issues and Christian Living

We ask so much of Christian women today. Perhaps too much.

Why do some Christians seem twice the child of hell now than before they got “saved”?

So heavenly minded you’re no earthly good? You just may be…

When we carve the Bible up into little snippets and toss them around willy-nilly, we may not be using the Book as God intended.

Right eye causing you to sin? Got a wardrobe straight out of Fredrick’s of Hollywood? You might be suffering from…

Or you may be suffering from never having heard that you’re beautiful. And that’s heartbreaking.

When Christians attempt the melding of Hollywood and the Faith, usually one of those components gets slighted.

We focus on the moment of salvation, but what about the sixty years of life—and an eternity beyond—that follow?

Some people would crawl over broken glass to save another person from hell. On the other hand…

If we have the mind of Christ, how is it that we can’t live out His thoughts?

One day, we’ll see how it was all worth it.

Tough Questions

Christians should never run from tough questions others ask about the faith. But what if we’re asking ourselves those same questions?

Does any of the Imago Dei still reside in us after the Fall? And if so, what are the ramifications for us?

Can you have both money and a ministry?

Are Christians living prepared for an economic meltdown?

Why is it so hard to pick a Bible translation?

Controversial Subjects

Used to be that anyone claiming he heard from God wound up in the nuthouse. If so, all Christians should be in a rubber room—and be overjoyed for it.

Worshiping in Spirit and Truth? Well, not according to that guy…

To baptize or not baptize? And how do we know our child’s profession of faith is genuine?

And still the partying goes on! Well, until it ends…

A sad face is good for the heart, but you won’t hear a sermon condoning it.

Charismatic Issues

Faith is faith. We either have it or we don’t. We shouldn’t belittle those who do.

Heretic Hunting and Judgment

Always arguing, but never doing the works of Christ in the world. What good is being right if our neighbor goes to hell or the poor man dies from neglect?

The year started out with a witch hunt against the classic spiritual disciplines practiced by Christians for centuries. Are they from the pit of hell or from the hand of God?

The most linked-to post of 2006. Physician, heal thyself.

Are we so desperate to be found right that we’ll gleefully destroy other people?

He’s a better Christian than we are. Has better ideas, too. Someone better take him down before he makes us all look bad.

I’m a Charismatic Reformational Quasi-Amillennial Post-Lutheran Credobaptist Homeschooling Christian Educator! Now do you have enough ammo to rip me to shreds?

If we have a problem with our brother and the way he handles truth, we are called by Christ to speak with him face to face in order to rightly resolve our dispute. Especially if we’re writing a book on absolute truth.

Writing and Publishing

And speaking of writing, why is it that Christian novels feature characters that don’t seem like the people you know?

We’re always complaining that our society is awash in sex and violence.  If Christian fiction is any measure, one of those two vices gets a reprieve.

More Cowbell Awards

The readers love The Award No One Wants to Win. I think it’s a conspiracy.

So do the Christian Educators.

Enjoy!

Random Links & Thoughts

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Today's an outlandishly busy day for me, so what goes on the site? Random links and thoughts.

Oh, joy!

I used to have a lot of Steve Camp vinyl in my heavy CCM days. Steve hit pretty hard back then (though Keith Green had him beat in the heavy lyrics department), and he's still sledgehammering away, this time online. While I find him to be a little too in your face on his blog at times, over the last two weeks he's posted some outstanding material, the first almost prescient in light of the Haggard fiasco:

Tim Challies weighs in on the Evangelical news of the moment with a truly grace-filled post entitled "The Scandal."

Meanwhile, Keith Drury contributes a canny assessment of the reasons some well-known preachers fall. 

Mark Driscoll (whom I fear some people would love to see go the way of Haggard) weighs in with practical and unflinching advice on how to keep one's ministry from going up in flames. While I like most what he has to say, he still advocates the mistaken notion that the pastor is a class apart from the rest of the people in the church. Though that thinking may be the general consensus within Evangelicalism, the general consensus is nonetheless wrong. That consensus only fosters the problem .

Take time to pray for Milton Stanley of Transforming Sermons as he recovers from surgery. Milton's site culls some of the choicest material from the best blogs out there. Make sure to include it in your newsreader of choice.

And lastly, if you want a break from all the Sturm und Drang, you can't get a better laugh than Weird Al Yankovic's recent video, "White & Nerdy." I've got to hand it to the guy, he's still a hoot. I think this is the funniest video I've seen from him yet. Wikipedia's got an entry just for this song/video, and it's fascinating, too. For us fortyish, white nerds, everything in the video hits home. I especially liked the back alley buy of the rare "Star Wars Holiday Special." Nothing says "I have no life" better than coveting a TV show filled with dancing Ewoks. Don't miss. (HT: BHT )