Links, links and more links!

Busy morning today, but I have a backlog of links I wanted to post for various reasons.

Holiness UK
First, I was recently contacted by Brian Johnson of Holiness.org.uk. He wrote:

Hi there Laura,

just found your site after doing a search on “holiness” on Google.

I recently felt led to start up a website in England calling God’s people to holiness.

The URL is http://www.holiness.org.uk and I hope you like it. All my resources are free and I have several challenging audio mp3 talks on “The Holiness of God.”

There’s a lot of great resources there, from all the great thinkers that I so admire. Tozer, Spurgeon, A.W. Pink, J.C. Ryle, Andrew Murray… a wealth of resources on the topic of holiness. I was reading in Hebrews today,

For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.
(Hebrews 5:12-14)

Holiness UK is not just solid food – it’s steak. Dig in, and enjoy every bite.

Ignoring Beauty
Desiring God blog has a great post about how easy it is to ignore the beauty that surrounds us, and asks “Is it immoral to ignore beauty?”

Downsizing DC
The popular NOLA blogger Ernie the Attorney had a great link – DownsizeDC.org. It pushes the “Read the Bills” act and will make Congress sign off on the fact that they have actually read the bills on which they vote.

RTBA requires that . . .

* Each bill, and every amendment, must be read in its entirety before a quorum in both the House and Senate.

* Every member of the House and Senate must sign a sworn affidavit, under penalty of perjury, that he or she has attentively either personally read, or heard read, the complete bill to be voted on.

* Every old law coming up for renewal under the sunset provisions must also be read according to the same rules that apply to new bills.

* Every bill to be voted on must be published on the Internet at least 7 days before a vote, and Congress must give public notice of the date when a vote will be held on that bill.

* Passage of a bill that does not abide by these provisions will render the measure null and void, and establish grounds for the law to be challenged in court.

* Congress cannot waive these requirements.

One notorious incident that this bill would have prevented is when Mitch Glazier, then chief counsel, Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property, now (quelle suprise!) RIAA’s Senior Vice President of Government Relations, slipped a provision into a completely unrelated bill that “made music recordings ‘works for hire’ which in turn meant artists weren’t able to get possession of their own masters.”

One great benefit to this is that complying with this bill will take time – thereby forcing Congress to focus in on what’s really important, and giving them less time to meddle in our lives. Bills will be shorter and more comprehensible, providing more “sunshine” over the legislative process, and it will be easier to hold these people accountable for what they are doing.

I don’t agree with everything on the DownsizeDC blog, but this is not a right-left issue – every American should be able to get behind this legislation, and every blogger ought to be writing about it and promoting it.

Letters to a Prison Cell
If you’ve been following the travesty of justice that put border Agent Ramos in jail for an absurdly long time, while giving immunity and paying off the drug deal he shot, you know that he’s in solitary confinement for his own protection. In spite of the fact that he’s not in solitary for punitive reasons, the rules about reading material are being strictly enforced. Learn more about his situation, and how to send him a letter – or better yet, a free book, one chapter at a time – to help him pass the time.

Family-Friendly Videos, You-Tube Style
I’ve written before about GodTube, an explicitly Christian variation on YouTube, and today I was contacted by someone at Zigvid.com, which has videos which are not primarily Christian, but they are clean, and some of them are pretty funny. They can’t be embedded – maybe because I’m not a member, and I can’t sign up because they are still beta-testing – but here’s one that tickled me, especially given my recent post on discerning God’s will.

It’s an honor to be nominated…
A new meme is apparently making the rounds, and I’ve been fortunate enough to be tagged with it twice in the last two weeks. First Perri Nelson, and now Jay Adkins have tagged me with the Thinking Blogger Award. I’m quite honored, and I wish I could tag them back, because both of their blogs make ME think. Here are the rules, as listed here:

Should you choose to participate, please make sure you pass this list of rules to the blogs you are tagging. I thought it would be appropriate to include them with the meme.

The participation rules are simple:

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn’t fit your blog).

And here are – in no particular order – five of the many blogs that make me think:
1. Imago Dei
2. Threads from Henry’s Web
3. Reformed Chicks Blabbing
4. The Writer’s Blog
5. No Neutrality

If you haven’t visited their sites yet, go take a look!