This is a continuation of my series of posts on new words that I learn from my reading.
cachetnoun: the state of being respected or admired; prestige
Jeremy’s usage: “The other baseball fan realized that he couldn’t match my cachet once I told him the names of my kids.”
I read it in this book: Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi
I invite you to leave a comment with your own usage of the word “cachet.”
I read this recently in Tim Keller’s book King’s Cross. This is fascinating.
In an interview Andrew Walls, a distinguished historian of world Christianity, noted that wherever the other great world religions began, that is still their center today. Islam started in Arabia, at Mecca, and the Middle East is still the center of Islam today. Buddhism started in the Far East, and that’s still the center of Buddhism. So too with Hinduism–it began in India and it is still predominantly an Indian religion. Christianity is the exception; Christianity’s center is always moving, always on a pilgrimage.
Walls hinted that when Christianity is in a place of power and wealth for a long period, the radical message of sin and grace and the cross can become muted or even lost. Then Christianity starts to transmute into a nice, safe religion, one that’s for respectable people who try to be good. And eventually it becomes virtually dormant in those places and the center moves somewhere else.
This is a continuation of my series of posts on new words that I learn from my reading.
miasmanoun: a highly unpleasant or unhealthy smell or vapor
Jeremy’s usage: “The miasma of spoiled milk that hit me when I cleaned out my son’s milk cup (which had gone missing for a day), was thick enough you could taste it.”
I read it in this book: Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi
This post is part of a series on faith in the New Testament.
For years now I’ve been a big fan of Tim Keller. I admire him as a theologian, as a preacher, and as an author. I agree with many that he is the closest thing to a modern day C.S. Lewis that we have today. As is true with just about anybody that I listen to, this does not mean I agree with everything he says. I’m currently reading through his book entitled King’s Cross and he addressed faith in a way that seems to be very common these days.
“…faith ultimately is not a virtue; it’s a gift. If you want to believe but can’t, stop looking inside; go to Jesus and say, ‘Help me believe.’ Go to him and say, ‘So you’re the one who gives faith! I’ve been trying to work it out by reasoning and thinking and meditating and going to church in hopes that a sermon will move me–I’ve been trying to get faith by myself. Now I see that you’re the source of faith. Please give it to me.’ If you do that, you’ll find that Jesus has been seeking you–he’s the author of faith, the provider of faith, and the object of faith.”
This sounds great. But it puts the responsibility of faith primarily on God. The problem with this for me is that there are some passages that seem to lean in this direction while others seem to imply just the opposite, as we shall soon see.
Here’s the question as I see it: Continue Reading…
I recently read Howard Shultz’s latest book, Onward. While some of it was overlap from another book I read of his back in 2007, this book focused on the last few years of Starbucks’ journey through the down economy. I’m not a die hard coffee fan but I enjoyed the journey he described in coming back as the CEO after the company found itself backed up against a wall. A giant company as big as Starbucks often brings the appearance that it is too big to fail, but Howard acknowledges how this doesn’t compute.
“How could one imperfect cup of coffee, one unqualified manager, or one poorly located store matter when millions of cups of coffee were being served in tens of thousands of stores? We forgot that ‘ones’ add up.”
“Ones” add up for all of us regardless of the size of the organization you are a part of. This is especially true when viewed as the church and the fact that we must focus on God transforming one person at a time. Admittedly, I’m not a Starbucks fanatic, but hearing Howard’s insights into running a company with excellence are easy to apply to whatever it is that you find yourself involved with.
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