Around the ‘Sphere

Just a few things I’m looking at in the blogosphere and elsewhere:

Colby Willen takes on church marketing strategies, observing a local church’s tagline (“Big Enough to Serve You, Small Enough to Care”) that matches at least four other business slogans found on the web. He writes:

Okay, even if you haven’t thought through what the church is supposed to be, surely some alarms go off in your head when a church is advertising with the same slogan as equipment, painting, and HR companies

I guess this blows my idea of incorporating the McDonald’s “I’m lovin’ it” campaign into our church’s missions strategy…

Joe Carter is resuming the Evangelical Outpost Blog Symposium for the 2nd quarter of the year. The deadline is April 15 (sounds familiar…), and the topic is broad—Judeo-Christian morality in an ethically pluralistic society. I’d best get to thinking and writing.

Even though Technorati says there are 8,635,175 weblogs, I can still count the number of bloggers I’ve met personally on one hand (I’ve got lots of fingers…). I met another one this weekend—blogger Nikki Tatom, who self describes her blog as “A Random Site About Random Stuff.” It’s random indeed, but good enough for me to add it to my “They Maketh Me Smile” category. Check it out.

Since Amazon.com is an integral resource of the blogosphere, here’s what’s in my latest order:

• Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s novel that just won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
• Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell
• The Complete Father Brown, by G. K. Chesterton
• In This Mountain, by Jan Karon (for the wife)

Can’t wait to jump into those. But alas: “of making many books there is no end…”