Tim Keller’s New Book - coming February 2008
Tim Keller’s new book has recently showed up at amazon.com and now you can pre-order it (yes, be among the first to get one!)::
The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (Hardcover)
by Timothy Keller (Author)
List Price:$24.95
Price: $16.47This title will be released on February 14, 2008.
Product Details
* Hardcover
* Publisher: Dutton Adult
* Language: English
* ISBN-10: 0525950494
* ISBN-13: 978-0525950493
[update 8/25: According to Michael Keller, Tim's son, the book title is not yet final, even though it is listed at amazon. [previous working title was "In Defense of God: Doubting Your Doubts"] Here’s the book’s Table of Contents:
Introduction – All doubts are leaps of faith
PART 1 - The Leap of Doubt
1. There can’t be just one true religion.
2. A good God could not allow suffering.
3. Christianity is a straitjacket.
4. The church is responsible for so much injustice.
5. A loving God would not send people to hell.
6. Science has disproved Christianity.
7. You can’t take the Bible literally.
Intermission
PART 2 - The Grounds for Faith
8. The clues of God
9. The knowledge of God
10. The problem of sin
11. Religion and the gospel
12. The (true) story of the cross
13. The reality of the resurrection
14. The Dance of God
Epilogue – Where do we go from here?
Redeemer Presbyterian Church, pastored by Tim Keller, was recently featured in Outreach Magazine’s Top 25 multiplying churches list. (Redeemer was ranked as “#1″, whatever that means.) The more interesting read is Dr. Warren Bird’s article, “Church in the City: Although they are different New York City churches with very different audiences, Redeemer Presbyterian and Infinity Church are part of the same multiplication equation with a product of continuous Kingdom growth” — especially the (short) interview with Keller titled, “The Genius of Church Planting.”
temporarily homeless
We are now officially temporarily homeless. We have no home address for the next 3 weeks. We’ve started our cross country drive to move from DC to OC. We’re making a stay here in Winchester Virginia to celebrate Father’s Day and to review and refine our itinerary. Special thanks to my brother Deef [he blogs a ton about day trading] for a webcam that will provide live streaming/ broadcasting of our cross country drive.
Blogging will be paused here and migrate over to www.Coast2CoastMove.com for the next 3 weeks. Blogging should resume here after I arrive somewhere on the West Coast. Yes, we are moving without a moving truck and we’ve packed all our worldly possessions into our Xterra — see this video to see all our stuff.
time is more valuable than money
We set sails for the West Coast in just over 24 hours from now. As we say our farewells to people who we did manage to squeeze in one last supper with, the old adage “Time is money” doesn’t fit the new economy or the American affluence. Time is more valuable than money, and there’s just not enough to go around. We couldn’t get meal times with everyone we wanted to, although the big picnic idea last Saturday did consolidate more people together for one big farewell at one time, but not everyone could make it on that date/time.
While we’ve been packing like mad during the past couple of weeks, and aiming to move cross country without a moving truck, we did wind up having to ship a dozen or so boxes. Instead of spending time to sort and toss certain files, it saved more time (on this side of the move) to pack, ship, and sort later, than to sort now and ship less, because the clock is ticking.
Time is a limited resource. It actually levels the playing field. It doesn’t matter how rich or poor you are, we all have the same amount of time. Everyone has 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. You can’t store up time, the clock is always ticking. Even multitasking doesn’t really save time.
What you can do is choose how to use your time — you can choose ahead of time by planning (and plan for unplanned times) or choose in the moment by not planning. (The latter is less efficient and uses up more time, but I still much prefer the latter.) I’d been a part of a ministry that produces the Life Management Study (there’s an online version too), which is all about managing life by managing time, promising to free people from anxiety and stress. It’s a rigorous 12-week course, and for those who continue using the LMS tools and techniques, it works.
I find myself shopping much more online than in person, because of time. This InformationWeek article, Time: It Really Is Money — Companies can prosper by helping customers save time, makes time sense to me ::
To see what I mean by the cost of time, think about having to buy something. You have to pay to buy a product, and you also have to spend some time completing the transaction. For example, if you want to buy a book to take on vacation, you can drive to a bookstore, find something on the shelves, stand in line to pay for it, and drive back home. If this takes a quarter of an hour and the cash price for the book is $20, the total cost of the book is $20 plus 15 minutes of your time. Contrast this customer experience with an alternative: You buy the book by going on the Web, typing a few keystrokes, and clicking on a button to complete the sale. The book will arrive in your mailbox or on your doorstep in a few days. Because you have to pay $5 for shipping and handling, the direct monetary cost of this transaction might be $25 in charges on your credit card. But the online purchase takes only two minutes of your time. Which, then, is the less expensive way to buy the book?
5 for fighting slavery: free songs download
Lamont is giving away 5 free songs if you sign up with one (or more) of the affiliated abolitionist orgs that’s fighting modern-day slavery:
- Free the Slaves
- International Justice Mission
- Not for Sale
- Justice for Children International
- Stop the Traffik
On the intercept page, you’ll need to refer 5 other emails to friends and/or family who would want to do the right thing and fight slavery.
abundance mentality and generosity connected
I know we have so much here in affluent America, myself included, and recent downscaling has begun to show me a freedom from stuff, and I hope that’d be an enduring freedom that also translates into generosity. Generous Giving has the most excellent biblical teachings on cultivating generosity. I think the idea of philanthropy goes beyond a cultural thing, it’s having an abundance mentality, and not a scarcity mentality:
1 big implication: if Asian American churches caught this abundance mentality, there’d be more launching of next generation multi-Asian/ multi-ethnic churches to reach more people for Christ, instead of being concerned about how to keep people attending the same immigrant Asian church; after all, Asian Americans have the highest family median income of any ethnic/racial grouping.
Now, since I’ve already met and exceeded my fundraising goal for defraying my costs for the upcoming cross country move (although you CAN still chip in for costs!), here’s a more noble cause for you to chip in for. (One of my Leadership Network colleagues, Todd Rhoades, has 4 children. I don’t know how he does that, as we have our hands full with just 1.) I believe many of you have extra dollars — you can help Todd’s son, Taylor, get to New Orleans to help with the Gulf Coast recovery, a much more noble cause than my family move. Taylor doesn’t blog, far as I know, but his dad Todd sure does (over at MondayMorningInsight.com):
Last year I shared about my son’s mission trip to the gulf coast. Taylor was able to take a Mississippi with a group of his friends and youth pastor last year. Well, it’s a year later, and Taylor is looking forward to returning to Mississippi and this time to New Orleans to continue to help the folks in that area of the country. And this year, I’d love to have you be involved in making this happen for Taylor and his group …
It’s pretty simple… Taylor has to come up with at least $150 to make this trip happen for him.
If you have a little extra of God’s money laying around and would like to help him out, you can do so below. If not, please take some time to pray for his group as they leave next month. (I’ll give updates here, for sure).
I think it’d be really cool if some of the readers of MMI could help provide some support for Taylor; but also for some of the other kids going on the trip. So, here’s the deal… if anyone would like to chip in for their trip, I’ll put half toward Taylor’s trip and the other half toward another person who’s going. And if more comes in than needed for Taylor then all of it will go toward the cost of the trip for others…
If enough MMI readers would chip in $5 or 10 bucks, then the trip could be paid for. How cool would that be?
