Last year, I received a holiday present from an person I'd never met, sent to my work address. It was We, a dystopia by Yevgeny Zamyatin. It was a great gift, catering to my interests in Russia, sci-fi, and politics, despite the fact that I had already read We. So, the moral of the story.

When are church members, especially bloggers, allowed to criticize church leaders? There was a guy named Martin Luther who answered this question rather a while back.

Hugo Schwyzer, in telling us that atonement theory drew him to Christianity, wrote: "I first came to love Jesus because He died for me, not because some progressive preacher told me that he 'successfully embodied a radical new ethic of inclusiveness and community!'." And that reminded me of something Seth had written: "One thing I notice is that only a tiny percentage of people who call doctrines they don't believe inspirational will spend any significant amount of time studying them for inspiration."

Finally, two of the most appealing pop-culture Christians of recent times -- Fred Rogers and Johnny Cash.