I wanted to make my readers aware of some advertising they’ll be seeing around my site. I use the Beacon Ad Network to bring quality, wholesome, Christian advertising to my readers. The revenue I’ll be raising won’t be very much, but it will help me recoup some of the costs of hosting and operating the site.
I’m aiming for the advertising to be unobtrusive and tame. I hope it blends in to my overall site design and that it also can be noticed and bring the advertisers people who are interested in their products.
Let me thank BaptistHost.net publically for being the first official advertiser on my site. If you scroll down past this post you’ll see their 468 x 60 (pixels) ad. I encourage you to visit their site, and see their offer on quality web hosting.
I have long thought my site would be perfect for authors or Christian publishers to advertise new books that would be of interest to my audience. Christian ministries or vendors may also fit my site well. Current advertising options are as follows:
6 – 125 x 125 (pixels) ads in the top right of my sidebar – $12 per 30 days. (these can be combined to make 250 x 125 or 250 x 250 ads also)
2 – 468 x 60 (pixels) ads below the first post on all blog pages – $22 per 30 days
I’m currently averaging around 11,000 ad impressions a month. I still have lots of space available (the sponsors in my sidebar are sample ads). Click here to purchase advertising through my account at Beacon Ads. Feel free to contact me about other possibilities or with any questions.
Desiring God just posted John Piper’s thoughts on watching movies, from an Ask Pastor John live event from some time back. From my vantage point I see his thoughts as a helpful corrective to contemporary Christianity. When Christianity Today can publish a glowing review of the “Sex and the City” movie, something is obviously wrong. May we all take care in our entertainment choices and guard our hearts.
Here is the video clip of Pastor John answering the question. Below you’ll find the edited transcript of his answer.
Is it possible to glorify God through the enjoyment of music, movies, literature, etc. produced by secular artists?
Yes. I assume the computer you are holding there was probably not built by Christians, and I hope that you are glorifying God as you tap away at it. And of course out from there, there are a 1000 things that we use all day long, and God says, ‘whatever you do, whether you eat or drink, do all to the glory of God.’ And he knows that you are eating this meat that may have been sacrificed to idols, so that means it was probably butchered by an unbeliever, or handled by an unbeliever, shipped by an unbeliever, it may have been cooked by an unbelieving cook. And here you are savoring the product of all those unbelievers’ work because you are in that moment giving thanks to God for it, recognizing that the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof and taking the strength and the joy that comes from it to render back to him.
Now with the arts and with media it is more morally complex than with food. But it is the same principle. The complexity of it is, in those moments what do you do with the moral elements of it that are so contrary to your faith?
I’ll just point out one principle because we can talk about this forever. What concerns me is the distinction between entertainment and cultural analysis. To watch something, to study the culture, learn from the culture, be more able to interact with unbelievers for the sake of the glory of Christ is one thing. To just sit and bask in nudity, or bask in fifty f-words, or bask in a world view that is shot through with arrogance to the core, and enjoy it? Hmm. That seems to point to something going on in the heart. And frankly, I have tasted it big time. I think today we are going to have to work at not being shaped by the world because the world has made its world view so scintillatingly attractive.
Movie after movie after movie has come out and most young reformed people are, I would say, indiscriminate. “Let’s go to a movie tonight.” OK, and then we just choose the best. None of the movies in that theater at that night are any good, probably. But you are just going to do it, because that is what you do. You go to the movies on Friday night, or whatever. And then of course you think, we’ve got to Christianize this thing somehow.
I just think we need to test our hearts big time. Big time. Why are we able to enjoy hell bound, God ignoring, Christ dishonoring, false world views because we can give it a little twist at the end that it taught us this or that about the world? So, I think the main thing I’m saying there is, test your heart as to whether entertainment is defaulting to the world, or to something more wholesome. We live in an age where we tend to default to the world for entertainment. [Quoted from Desiring God’s post, emphasis added]
Everyone reading this post, is reading it on a blog. So this will skew the results of this poll. Still, I’m wondering what this poll will show about how people like you and I hear of new books.
Feel free to share some thoughts in the comment section too. The world of book publicity is constantly changing these days. I’m interested to see what this poll will show.
Recently, I was discussing how blogging and book-reading complement each other. I find I read more theological books as a result of my blogging than I might otherwise. Yet blogging does eat up time and keep me from reading as much as I’d like. It’s more than just time, however. Blogging gives me bits and pieces of info which fascinate me and substitute the place of reading to some degree.
It’s not just blogging. All things internet promote a piecemeal view of the world. News and information, on the run, in bite size pieces. Immediate access. Unending links to yet more and more and more. The daily presence and impact of the internet on the majority of today’s culture, myself included, is shaping how we think and how we read.
In college, I was required to read Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. In that book he argued that the various technological media of our day and any other, impact what and how we think far more than we realize. He showed how the printing press revolutionized the world, just as had the alphabet before it, and now the TV (and nightly news) after it. I think Neil’s work should be updated to include the internet’s influence. It will be interesting to see how dramatically it will shape our thinking and culture.
My thoughts here were spurred on by stumbling across an interesting article entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” [HT: Stephen Altrogge]. Nicholas Carr, who recently published a book on this topic, does a good job of explaining the problem in this column (published in The Atlantic). It’s definitely worth your time to read it all the way through (without skimming, mind you…).
I’m not so sure the internet’s influence is a huge problem, but I think we should all be aware as to just how much our reading habits are influenced by our internet usage. This makes me even more satisfied with my new focus on reading and reviewing more books on my blog. This will help my blog serve my aim to read more books. I hope you’ll join me in reading more books, because Christians after all, are people of The Book. It follows we need to preserve the art of reading and thinking (and even writing), since God communicated to us not in a movie, or a drama, not on the internet or a magazine, but through books, 66 of them.
I hope most Republicans have learned by now that the New York Times and fair journalism are polar opposites. So when the Times takes one short statement out of an 8000 word interview, ignores the context and makes it into a big issue, you’d think Republicans (at least) would know enough to pass this off as leftist bias. Unfortunately that isn’t the case.
Okay then, here’s the scoop. Huckabee was being primed by a reporter to give his judgments on Mormonism and Romney. Huckabee (as he has consistently done in the past), was loathe to comment. He doesn’t think Romney’s Mormonism disqualifies him from the presidency, or that it should be an issue at all. So the reporter, who is also an expert in comparative religion, was pressing the issue. Huckabee at one point thought the reporter knew more about Mormonism than he did, and he innocently asked a clarifying question: “Don’t Mormons believe Jesus and the Devil are brothers?” The original reporter, in the context of his story, explained the question was neutral.
Not so the New York Times. They have read into that statement all kinds of malice. And this is yet another Huckabee attack in the media.
For what it’s worth, Huckabee apologized to Romney, and explained the situation at length in this video, this one, and this one. But perhaps the best response to this uproar is an excellent post by Steven Nielson entitled “I’m no expert on Hinduism, but Don’t Hindus worship cows?” His post is well worth the read, even if you (like me), could care less about yet another New York Times hack job.
Recently, I was discussing