« November 2007 | Main | January 2008 »
Have you considered reading the Bible in 90 Days? Or listening to The Bible Experience each day in 2008?
We hope you'll create a plan for your life in 2008 to engage God's Word every day! Zondervan has a comprehensive web page with various ways you can create your very own 2008 Bible Reading Plan. Check out Zondervan's Bible Reading Plans at this link.
What's your plan?
The Los Angeles Times had a front page feature story about Zondervan on Christmas Day. Read the full article at this link.
The Christmas Story from The Bible Experience is now available as a FREE download on iTunes.
If you don't use iTunes, the free download is also available on audible.com.
We want to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and thought this would be a nice gift. We hope you enjoy it!
Zondervan's blog occasionally features essays from our authors. Today's essay is by John Koessler, author of A Stranger in the House of God.
The Perfect Gift?
Recently Newsweek’s cover story was about the Kindle, Amazon’s electronic reading device. Amazon, of course, is the online retailer that revolutionized the bookselling. Now it has set its sights on an even loftier goal. It wants to re-engineer the book.
The Kindle is light, just over 10 ounces and its physical design, while not imitating the bound pages of a book, stylistically evokes the memory of a book. So what can Kindle do that a book can’t do? It can change the font size with the push of a button. It can store 200 books at a time. Readers can leave an electronic bookmark and make notes that are stored on Amazon’s servers.
Will the Kindle eventually replace the book? Probably not. At least, not in my lifetime. As any book lover knows, the joy of reading is not just about information. It’s about the experience. There is more to a book than mere words on page. There is the feel of the paper and the beauty of the type. There is the reassurance we get from the weight of the thing. Not the gravity of the subject matter but the physical weight of the bound pages. For all its tricks, the Kindle will never be able to reproduces these aspects of the reader’s experience.
Nor will it be able provide a living record of a reader’s relationship with the book. No scrawled notes in the margin left in someone’s spidery hand. No backwards letters or stick figures scribbled by children who are long since grown and gone. No stains or creased pages to mark the stages of the reader’s first journey through the author’s world and no makeshift book mark, the torn page of some old magazine or grocery list, left between the pages like a miniature time capsule for a generation to come.
News of the release of the Kindle made me think back to a Christmas long past and the gift my mother had lovingly placed beneath our tree. Although I couldn’t see through the colorful wrapping, it’s sharp corners and rectangular shape left no doubt as to what was underneath. It was a copy of the complete Winnie-the-Poor and The House at Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne with decorations and new illustrations in full color by E. H. Shepard. The cream colored pages felt like velvet and smelled like licorice. My mother read it to me when I was small and decades later I took it from the shelf and read from it to my children. Today the binding is broken and its stained cover is tattered at the edges. Yet I cannot pick it up without feeling a measure of the wonder I first felt as a child. When Amazon’s Kindle can do that, I’ll buy it.
Read & Review Tomorrow's Books Today
Advance Reader Copies (ARCs) of great books by fabulous authors are offered FREE by Zondervan from time to time to give you the opportunity to review and comment on them before they're available in bookstores. Reviewers are selected on a first come/first served basis as long as ARC supplies last. By requesting an ARC of a forthcoming book, you agree to read and write a review of it on that title's page on http://www.amazon.com/, http://www.barnesandnoble.com/ and http://www.christianbook.com/, as well as other sites and blogs.
To request an ARC of Character Makover, 40 Days with a Life Coach to Create the Best You by Katie Brazelton and Shellie Leith , send us an email with your name and postal mailing address (street, city, state, ZIP code). By doing so, you acknowledge that you are above the age of 13. Currently, participation in this program is limited to those who live in North America.
"Even though hip-hop has its roots in the rough inner-city, it has become the identity of many suburbanites of emerging generations. The urban mindset has spread well beyond the city limits. In fact, hip-hop achieved its dominance because of the economic force of suburban dollars. According to Forbes, “Hip-hop is no longer the music or culture of a particular ethnic group. Hip-hop has grown well beyond the urban market since the genre’s first hit, ‘Rapper’s Delight,’ was released in 1979…Its customer base is the 45 million hip-hop consumer between the ages of 13-34, 80 percent of whom are white.”
Theses facts show that the culture in which we live has changed. Things were much different ten or fifteen years ago. Unfortunately, the church, by and large, hasn’t acknowledged this shift. Youth ministry hasn’t grasped it. Many large ministry organizations haven’t come to grips with it either. Publishers and ministry-resource companies busily produce material from a pre-urban mindset – material that doesn’t engage its audience like it could or should. The church, for the most part, still believes that anything urban-oriented is only for the inner-city or ethnic crowd. This couldn’t be farther from the truth." from Un.orthodox by Tommy Kyllonen (pg. 9-10)
Click on the link above to hear an interview with Tommy. Click here for more information about Un.orthodox.
Are you looking for a fresh daily Christian perspective on the news? If so, Zondervan's To The Point email newsletter is exactly what you are looking for!
To The Point is our Monday through Friday 1-minute smart and fast scouting report that points you to news on the Web. This report starts your day informed and prayerful about a pivotal happening, vital trend, leadership quality, important statistic, or insightful article you need to know to broaden your horizon and be effective in your Christian ministry.
Click here to view today's To The Point email newsletter. To subscribe to To The Point, along with other Zondervan ePublications, click here.
Zondervan's blog occasionally features essays from our authors. Today's essay is by John Koessler, author of A Stranger in the House of God.
The Music of Advent
Advent is the official beginning of the Christian season in the church calendar and begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas. For me advent always begins after Thanksgiving. That’s because once Thanksgiving is finally gone, I feel justified in getting out my Christmas carols. Somehow playing them any earlier seems out of place, like wearing white shoes after Labor Day.
Nothing sets a seasonal mood like the old songs of Christmas. By that, I don’t mean the usual holiday fare you hear on the radio. These days holiday music is as ubiquitous on the radio as garland is on a Christmas tree. Every major city has at least one radio station that plays nothing but Christmas music in the days leading up to Christmas.
I suppose I should be glad. But the pop standards these channel’s feature do little for me. I don’t want to hear songs about Mommy kissing Santa Claus or how grandma got run over by a reindeer, though I confess to having a soft spot for anything sung by Nat King Cole, whether its holiday oriented or not. It’s real Christmas music that I want to hear.
By that I don’t mean old standards like “The First Noel,” “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” or “Silent Night.” Those songs seem over sung and tedious to me. No, I like my carols in a minor key, preferably with a hint of Gregorian chant. I like my carols sung by a choir in plainsong and Latin phrases. I want songs with haunting melodies and a hint of mystery. Songs that stir a longing in my heart like an echo that rises from the depths of some ancient cathedral.
The true theme of Advent is longing. It is a season that celebrates unfulfilled desire. The first advent, like the age in which we now live, was an in between time where God’s people dwelt in that grey land between promise and fulfillment. Most of us know that landscape well. We have spent much of our life there. Waiting for the right job. Waiting for the right person to come along. Waiting for the war to end and the economy to turn around. Waiting for God to answer our prayers.
Perhaps that’s why the church originally envisioned the advent celebration as a season of fasting, not as an orgy of preening, purchasing, and over eating. Advent is more about longing than it is about fulfillment and the best Christmas carols recognize this. That’s why there is always a note of sadness in them. They are not meant to cheer us but to make us aware of our hunger. The best Christmas carols do not make us smile. They move us to tears and compel us to add our own voices to the chorus the rings through the ages. The melody and lyrics may change. But the question is always the same: “How long, O Lord?”
