Rotundus.com

Ever wonder about the habits that some people have in churches?

... [The research] questions the wisdom of centuries-old habits, such as reading along with Bible passages, at the same time they are being read aloud in church. More of the passages would be understood and retained, the researchers suggest, if heard or read separately.

Tim Keller suggests (in this talk I think) that encouraging people to take notes minimizes the impact of sermons. Of course, he also argues for an evangelistic worship, arguing that a lot of Christians treat sermons as lectures rather than sermons.

I think that I'd agree with the first bit, but am undecided about the merits of note-taking. Your thoughts on this matter?

I ran into a post entitled "10 Ways to Avoid Building Community Within the Church" on probably half a dozen blogs this week, and figured that this was worth another mention.

Suggestion #2 regarding assigned seating is kind of amusing but seems to be the truth (of course, it also applies to classrooms and the like). Perhaps I should be "rebellious" and sit on the other side...

One thing that I've left Rotundus with over the last years is a fairly minimalistic appearance. Generally speaking there are posts, polls, and comments and that's been about it. There was at one time a collection of links to websites which vanished during the migration from PHPNuke to Drupal.

I'm sort of wondering if you like the site as is, or if you think that I should make some changes to things. One of the things that I've been thinking about doing is enabling profile pictures (eg. as seen on eg. my xanga site) just to add a little something to the site beyond plain text.

Another thing that I've been thinking about is bringing back the links page, or perhaps adding a few things to the sidebar. At the moment there are a few sites linking here, but at present the only outgoing links are those found in posts. There are also no links to places like my photo gallery.

Another reason to consider adding some links is that this website occasionally attracts people that seem to be searching for more than info on TV shows and the like. I seem to get oodles of queries related to the end of a certain TV show (and a surprising number of people seem to Google for locomotive numbers). I'm not too concerned about that. This site also seems to attract a reasonable chunk of theologically oriented search queries. This post on the emerging church seems to be attracting a reasonable amount of attention. I've also had a few queries from people looking for charismatic churches in Calgary - never any for reformed or presbyterian churches though. For these latter classes of queries I wonder if a few additional links might be useful to orient the folks launching these queries.

I wandered home from school today to discover a mystery package sitting upon my doorstep. The return address I recognized, but it belonged to a certain educational institution which I've never attended nor even applied to.

Opening the package I discovered that apparently someone thought my fridge too bare. A tribute to my sister as thanks for the Shakespearean version of magnetic art: