Had to pass on these sound-bytes from Eugene Peterson on the subject of prayer. They remind me why Peterson is one of my favorite authors...on just about whatever topic he approaches.

Much talk about prayer is like reading books about sex as “plumbing.” It’s boring because it’s not real life.

Prayer is the ability to approach anything and everyone and see/respond to the face of God. It is living in God-responsiveness to the people around you. Prayer discerns the face of God in our Esaus; it sees the ladders to heaven in our Bethels.

These are via iMonk (Michael Spencer), who recently heard Peterson speak in person. Spencer points to Eugene Peterson's Answering God as an excellent book on prayer (have it, haven't yet read it). Another one that doesn't read like a plumbing manual is Telford Work's Ain't Too Proud to Beg (which I reviewed here).

I resisted the temptation there to describe Work's book as another "sexy" book on prayer. But if I had, you'd know what I meant...

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In the last couple weeks, I've taken the Servants by Design inventory, the Discovery Tools assessment, the DISC Profile Personality Test, the Leadership Traits profile, and an extensive Ministry Profile assessment conducted by my seminary for outgoing students. No, I did not do all this by choice, because, given a choice, I prefer not to be slightly neurotic. It just happened--my classes conspired against me--and now I'm caught in this river of self-knowledge.

I was telling Lindsay, "Life has been kind of surreal lately. I feel like half the time I'm standing outside myself, looking at myself with one raised eyebrow. Me and I feel the same way." Part of the assessment conducted by my seminary involved an interview segment recorded on tape. My interlocutor played a few seconds back, and I had the rare pleasure of hearing my own voice and wondering, "Now who IS that young man? (and what is he hiding?!)"

Part of me wants to just say, "Look, I love basketball, adventure, espresso, books, writing, my family, and Jesus--also, I had a traumatic experience in fourth grade involving a very large water balloon--and I think that explains me sufficiently." Naw, not really. But you know what I'm saying. Or maybe you don't, which might be better.

So...how about them Jayhawks?

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[UPDATE:] Here are my 2008 NCAA Tournament Picks.

Those of you who are starting to think about your brackets will probably want to check out Seth Davis' latest March Madness Stock Report. A bunch of Big 12 teams show up. Notably, Seth says to sell your K-State stocks before the freshmen melt in the spotlight, and keep buying KU.

Surprise, surprise.

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Some books take weeks, if not months, to digest, and biblical commentaries fall in that category. Typically, you'd consider commentaries as reference works, cousins to encyclopedias, as opposed to literature. And I'm not exactly eager to review encyclopedias. Fortunately, there are commentaries and there are commentaries. Two in particular have impressed me over the last several weeks: Stanley Hauerwas' Matthew and Kent Hughes' Philippians.

I've got only a year in Greek and Hebrew each, so I'm far from a biblical languages expert, and when I read commentaries, I assess them on a literary level, not a technical one. For better or worse, you won't find me double-checking the cases of Greek verbs to see if the author's discussion was adequate. Don't get me wrong--I'm grateful for scholars who can perform more technical evaluations, but I am not that guy.

Here are some questions I ask when I read a new commentary, followed by some specific notes about Matthew and Philippians.

1. Does it focus on explaining scripture as scripture?--that is, evaluating passages in a linguistic, literary, historical, cultural, applied way--rather than trying to revise texts or speculate on a "higher" critical level?
   
2. Does the author take advantage of additional perspectives? Does he bolster his writing with other authoritative voices (like D.A. Carson, a top NT scholar) or illustrative material (Fyodor Dostoevsky, Wendell Berry, T.S. Eliot)? Does he quote relevant sources?
3. Finally, can the commentary be read devotionally? Does it inspire biblical worship as well as guide scriptural understanding?

That's where I'm coming from. And both Hauerwas and Hughes fit the bill here, rising to meet my admittedly "popular"-level qualifications. Both do an excellent job keeping first things first, explaining biblical meanings with clarity. Some authors end up stuffily obfuscating the heart of passages with overly technical analysis and terminology--not these men.

Kent Hughes' (Preaching the Word series) takes an expositional approach to Philippians, in that his commentary is essentially a series of thoroughly-developed sermons on the book. He writes pastorally, with a passion for illustration and application honed by his decades of preaching ministry. In particular, I appreciated Hughes' ability to interweave conversational dialog with scholarly explanation. He masterfully unpacks Paul's intentions in Philippians, then teases out the implications for spiritual living. Hughes is a preacher's preacher, and it shows.

Stanley Hauerwas (Brazos Theological Commentary series) looks at Matthew through a deliberately theological lens, drawing from the likes of Augustine and Luther, as well as more recent voices like Bonhoeffer and Barth. His insight into the life of Jesus, and the kingdom message that often lies just below the surface of Matthew's messianic account, is consistently penetrating. As well, Hauerwas is simply a good writer, and his commentary fluidly pulls you in. I found myself finishing chapters without realizing how much I'd read.

Based on my criteria, I recommend Kent Hughes' Philippians and Stanley Hauerwas' Matthew highly. They would be valuable for preachers, but their readability makes them accessible for anyone wanting to dig into the Bible on a deeper level. In the "popular" sense--think good, C.S. Lewisian popularizing--Matthew is especially gripping, and I'm looking forward to reading additional books in the Brazos series.

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Coffee has come to percolate--that is, permeate--society at almost every level, and that's especially true for people who spend hours a day staring at a monitor. If you're drinking coffee as you read this post, I salute you.

Here are ten coffee upgrades with the potential to transform brackish brew into a bright, aromatic cup.

What you may not realize is that you could turn your joe into JOE by making a few simple changes. Adopt these tricks, and you'll be hacking the average coffee experience. You'll be able to one-up Starbucks in your own kitchen--but precede with caution. Once you exchange that muddy-tasting buzz for a brilliant taste experience, there's no going back.

Here are ten coffee upgrades with the potential to transform brackish brew into a bright, aromatic cup. Some of them are common sense, a few of them will surprise you--but if you drink coffee frequently, they're all cost-effective.

10. Use clean, cold water. This may be as simple as turning your faucet all the way to the right, or as involved as installing a tap filter to deal with your 100-year-old pipes (took me five minutes). Bottled water is another option. Either way, you'll give your coffee a clear medium for self expression.

9. Buy good beans. Folgers is out. Starbucks would be a step up, but why go halfway? For the best results, look for a local company that roasts their own beans, which equates to smaller batches and greater freshness. You'll notice an immediate taste difference--and if you do a head to head comparison with a mass-produced brand, the difference will be dramatic. In KC, a couple of my favorite options are The Roasterie and Broadway Cafe.

8. Grind your own coffee beans. Some of you are scared right now, but you shouldn't be. The fact is, pre-ground beans may save time, but they kill flavor. Buy whole beans, and you'll keep the coffee oils and aromas intact (assuming the beans are recently roasted) until you're ready to brew. If you don't own a grinder, a painless first step would be a little whirlybird type (under $20) like the one I owned for years. But more on this later...

7. Measure your coffee and water. Getting the proportions wrong can result in watery, bland coffee, or a bitter, over-extracted brew. Might as well spend that extra 10 seconds and get the dosage right. Ideal measurements vary slightly depending on your machine (and your tastebuds), but a good ballpark figure for a drip machine is a tablespoon of ground coffee for every 8 ounces of water. For French press, it's more like a teaspoon for every 4 ounces.

6. Wash your coffee maker. With non-astringent soap and water, yes. But every six months or so, you should run a solution like CleanCaf through your machine to deal with grime and buildup. You'd be surprised at the residue that collects inside a coffee machine--or maybe you wouldn't be, if you clean out coffee mugs very often. Flushing with a cleaning solution is inexpensive, and it prevents taste loss and slow brew times due to clogged tubes.

5. Use your coffee within 20 minutes after you grind it. There's a technical, scientific explanation for why ground coffee quickly becomes stale, but I'll spare you the equations. Bottom line: Grind the beans, then get them into your cup, pronto! Why let the flavor dissipate on the warm breezes of your kitchen?

4. Use a quality coffee maker. Go ahead and throw Mr. Coffee in the trash. Higher-end drip coffee machines will do a good job (we like the Cuisinart Brew Central in chrome), but you can make smooth, delicious coffee with a hand-press model for as little as $25. If you want my advice, take a look at the AeroPress (right). An improvement on the "French press" model, the AeroPress is an award-winning little machine that is ingeniously simple and yields great-tasting results. (If you follow the link, be sure to take a look at the rave reviews.)

3. Upgrade your grinder. Until you realize how a grinder affects your coffee experience, shelling out serious money for one sounds like madness. That's why I suggest buying a cheap, push-button model first.
But once you experience the benefits of grinding your own beans, you'll realize that the taste dividends may justify a larger investment. As opposed to whirlybird, hack-a-bean types, burr grinders are made with sharp, opposing burrs that grind with precision and consistency.

The KitchenAid ProLine grinder was my first serious grinder, and I noticed the taste difference immediately--flavors were less muddy, more bright and aromatic. If you're looking for your first burr grinder, you won't regret buying this one: KitchenAid has exceptional customer service, and the grinder is very well designed, built like a tank, easy to use, and looks good on the counter. Excellent resale value as well, if you decide you need to upgrade. (Want to learn more? Here's the CoffeeGeek review that convinced me this was "the one.") To recap: Getting a "real" grinder may earn you the coffee geek label, but you won't mind! It's a quantum leap forward in taste.

2. Experiment with your palate. Dark roasts with strong, chocolately undertones are my personal favorite, and Ethiopia and Costa Rica are my favorite places of origin for beans. But until I started consciously sipping different varieties, "coffee" was just "coffee." So experiment: you'll discover there are a number of controlled factors that effect taste, and you'll like some better than others. Finding your favorites is rewarding.

1. Drink coffee with friends. You might think that I'm copping out on this tip, but I'm not! Sharing a cup affirms the fact that coffee drinking can be more than a physical experience. Grind your best beans, brew a pot, and pour it hot. There's a reason people love to have conversations in coffee shops. Why not create that delicious, caffeine-laced atmosphere in your living room? With the help of these tips, you can. :) There's are good reasons to wear the "coffee snob" label proudly.

[Note: The various caffeinated claims I make in this post can be substantiated on the spectacular, authoritative coffee site, CoffeeGeek. Look out, though, clicking around at CoffeeGeek quickly gets addictive!]

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When I started this blog in a public library on a whim three years ago, I had just finished Joseph Epstein's Snobbery--so of course I chose to give him a voluble nod in my first real post. Listen to me chatter happily while I did this new thing called BLOGGING:

So I’m pretty much anti-snob on all fronts, except for book-snobbery, coffee-snobbery, basketball-snobbery, and maybe a few more garden variety counts I’m forgetting...it seems that you could divide all bloggers, somewhat superficially, into two camps: snobs and anti-snobs, in terms of what they say and how they say it. I’m just being up-front about my voting preference.

Nice. Since then, of course, I have reversed my voting preference frequently, whenever the mood took me, in fact, like any good politician.

But if I remember correctly, Epstein admits that one of his pet snubs is reserved for people who didn't attend an Ivy League school. I'm obviously at a disadvantage there, since my undergraduate record is about as spotty as it gets where prestige is concerned: A year at Rockhurst U (private and pricey--too pricey, sadly), two years at Johnson County Community College (the king of jucos), all wrapped up online via Thomas Edison State College (it's in New Jersey). And I'm not exactly earning my graduate degree at Oxford.

So Epstein would no doubt glance at me dismissively, preferring, for example, some blue-blooded gorilla with a degree from Cornell (entrance standards aren't what they were ;). So it goes. But here's the thing. I would probably look at Epstein with a sarcastic grin, thinking, I bet you couldn't even dribble a ball up court, much less make a lay-up.

So maybe we all have our little snobberies. That was going to be the point of this post, before I got carried away with the Ivy League issue. In particular, I'm aware that my book snobbery may be getting out of hand: I want my books to look good. They need to be quality books--that goes without saying. But they also need to be well-dressed.

For example, I was recently thinking about trading in my old set of C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy for the newer edition with the covers that don't make Ransom's planets look like something painted by Salvador Dali in his pre-melting days. Is this ridiculous? I don't think so. I prefer to think that I've achieved a kind of holistic literary unity of spirit and body, in that a good book deserves a good cover. Is it possible I'm wrong about this, that I'm just becoming the kind of snob that other people secretly--or openly--laugh at?

No, this is not possible.

But you should probably take a good, hard look at your own life. What kind of a snob are you? Is it harmless? Is it affordable? Will it force you to repurchase books you already own?

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Last week, Rodney Olsen carried out an interview with a remarkable woman:

January the 22nd, 1999, is a day forever etched in the memory of Gladys Staines.

It is the day that her husband Graham, along with their young sons, Timothy and Philip, were burnt alive by a group of around 50 Hindu extremists in Orissa, India, where Graham had been working with the poor, especially those with leprosy.

Gladys has an amazing story to tell of how she and her daughter were able to forgive those who killed those they loved. While their forgiveness was offered right away, the healing took a lot longer.

If people became famous for sacrificial forgiveness, Gladys Staines would be a celebrity. Listen to her story here.

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[UPDATE:] Here are my 2008 NCAA Tournament Picks.

On last week's NCAA tournament watch, I noted that FOX Sports had six Big 12 teams represented in the season's first bracket. The same is true this week--and the same six teams are listed--but there's been some slippage. I'll list this week's rank in parentheses ( ) and the previous week's in brackets [ ].

Kansas (1) [1] - lost to Texas, otherwise, took care of business.
Texas (2) [3] - moved up, thanks to beating KU in Austin.
Texas A&M (6) [6] - despite a loss to Oklahoma State.
Kansas State (6) [5] - dropped a game to Texas Tech.
Baylor (11) [9] - losses to KU, Oklahoma State, Texas. Tough stretch.
Oklahoma (11) [6] - losses to Texas and bottom-feeder Colorado hurt OK's chances.

It wouldn't surprise me to see Oklahoma falling out of the tourney, possibly to be replaced by their in-state rivals, OK-State. FOX has seven Pac 10 teams making the big dance--which I take as an insult, after the Big 12 split the "Hardwood Challenge" with their West Coast rivals, 7 games to 7. ;) If I had to call it, I'd say both leagues will get six teams in.

Pleasant surprise: The ACC has only four teams listed. Despite Dick Vitale.

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In the second episode ("Confirmed Dead") of LOST season four, C.S. Lewis' formidable influence was inserted directly into the show in the form of "Charlotte Staples Lewis." Since then, there's been a steady proliferation of posts and articles discussing what exactly C.S.'s appearance implies for the LOST mythology. Personally, the physical presence of (a) Lewis in the show pushed me further toward LOST geekiness. I mean, now I really care.

So I've been doing a little research, and thought I'd try to compile a "best of" C.S. Lewis and LOST link list. There's a lot of discussion out there, but most of it isn't very substantial, so I'm doing some sorting. No doubt I'll miss some good articles, which is why I'm counting on you to point them out to me. Here's what I've got so far.

1. Charlotte Lewis on Lostpedia. Straightforward biographical info on Charlotte.
2. "Narnia Connection Confirmed" on Hollywood Jesus. If you have no clue who C.S. Lewis was, this post has some background along with a few Charlotte tips.
3. C.S. Lewis Arrives in LOST. My post, documenting Charlotte's entry. No great theories, but some wishful thinking and some good comments.
   
4. Charlotte Lewis post on Doc Arzt's LOST blog. The post merely notes Charlotte's splashdown, but the comments have some good stuff (time travel), including speculation that "even other books such as The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce could be of some value to us." Heck yeah, and not just for diagnosing TV shows! As a Lewis fan, I have to chuckle...
5. The Great Divorce (by C.S. Lewis) theory on Doc Artz's LOST blog. Artz develops some fascinating parallels between the island and the plot of Lewis' classic book. Purgatory undertones.
6. LOST episode recap from Jeff Jensen. Entertainment Weekly's LOST pundit speculates about a Prince Caspian tie-in and his hunch that Charlotte has been on the island before.
7. Charlotte Staples Lewis entry at LOSTtheories.com. This theory asks whether the island is a world-between-worlds as in C.S. Lewis' The Magician's Nephew.

Any other links I should add?

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I tend not to suffer from writer's block, but from the opposite: a lack of writer's block, also known as writer's exposure. When we moved into our new loft last January, I remember admiring the view and soaking in the sunlight that flooded our east-side windows, strong enough to tan you in 20 minutes. The place felt so bright, so healthy, so open... Too open.

"Maybe this is where I'll write my novel," I told my dad expansively. Now I'd amend my prediction slightly. Maybe this is where novels come to die. Aidan and I are in the middle of an arts and crafts project, making a sign out of posterboard to tape to our front door: Daddy's Book, R.I.P.

Sad thing is, I should have known better. My brother-in-law, Scott, warned me about this. He said there are a few things that should never be sacrificed in a marriage, things like open communication, personal integrity, regular date nights, and having your own home office.

Instead, I suffer from the opposite of writer's block--our loft has no real walls--only a living area and several partitions a good yard short of wallhood. Everyone who writes knows that writing is a focused activity. Writers need some separation, the ability to be deliberate, to sometimes bar oneself from the demands of a hungry, poopy, sippy-cup-throwing world. Writer's block.

This is shorthand for an office or a notebook computer. No amount of coffee can dispel the feeling that you're trying to write a serious letter in the middle of an airport terminal run by enthusiastic, over-caffeinated midgets.

Occasionally, I wake up in the morning feeling rested, and think, Today I'm going to write that post I've been thinking about for two weeks. And then I change a couple diapers, hand out some bananas and crackers, make coffee with a great deal of hands-on assistance, watch the first 25 minutes of Finding Nemo for the 47th time, play catch with a basketball, football, and small stuffed lion (simultaneously), subjugate a rogue remote control car, pick up barnyard dominoes three times--and think, Today I'm going to lie on the couch and have that semi-conscious movie marathon I've been thinking about for two weeks.

Like someone said, "You may have to live in a crowd, but you also have to live like it, and you darn well have to eat what they're eating. " Writing ideas run rampant around here, but they tend to get struck by passing traffic. What I need is some writer's block to keep the suckers contained. It's safe to say that our next place of residence will have real walls, multiple real walls, walls that reach to the ceiling, walls that give writer's block a chance.

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