Links! and a reminder

First the reminder: this Sunday is Pentecost! Wear red to church and cook something spicy (to remember the flames of fire).  :)  And, more than that, pray and read a gospel passage. As a professor of mine taught me, the Holy Spirit always points us to Christ. Look where He's pointing.

Okay, on to the links:

- "Don't Make Fun of the Renowned Dan Brown":

The critics said his writing was clumsy, ungrammatical, repetitive and repetitive. They said it was full of unnecessary tautology. They said his prose was swamped in a sea of mixed metaphors. For some reason they found something funny in sentences such as “His eyes went white, like a shark about to attack.” They even say my books are packed with banal and superfluous description, thought the 5ft 9in man. He particularly hated it when they said his imagery was nonsensical. It made his insect eyes flash like a rocket.

- "How to Root for Captain Kirk": Every month or so, my husband and I have some friends over to watch Star Trek. We worked our way through all the movies, and now we're watching the Original Series. Which made me the right audience for this article: I find Kirk both unlikeable and a heck of a lot of fun to watch. This article goes a long way towards explaining why, for being a jerk, he's still such a compelling character.

- And if you want more Star Trek goodness, Slate has been publishing a bunch of great articles about the franchise this week. Here's one: "The Top Six Star Trek Mistakes".

- "Enhanced Motion Detection in Autism May Point to Underlying Cause of the Disorder": well, wow.

-"Will Your First Book Be Published?": I love the Books & Such blog for just this kind of practical and insightful article.

-"PB sermon turns silk purse into sow’s ear": I just can't even . . .

- "Tragic Worship":

The psalms as the staple of Christian worship, with their elements of lament, confusion, and the intrusion of death into life, have been too often replaced not by songs that capture the same sensibilities—as the many great hymns of the past did so well—but by those that assert triumph over death while never really giving death its due. The tomb is certainly empty; but we are not sure why it would ever have been occupied in the first place.

Only the dead can be resurrected. As the second thief on the cross saw so clearly, Christ’s kingdom is entered through death, not by escape from it. Traditional Protestantism saw this, connecting baptism not to washing so much as to death and resurrection. Protestant liturgies made sure that the law was read each service in order to remind the people that death was the penalty for their sin. Only then, after the law had pronounced the death sentence, would the gospel be read, calling them from their graves to faith and to resurrection life in Christ. The congregants thereby became vicarious participants in the great drama of salvation.