With its monster-selling Vertigo tour complete, U2 is ready to reinvent itself, frontman Bono said during a BBC Radio interview earlier this week. “Our band has certainly reached the end of where we’ve been at for the last couple of albums,” he said. “I want to see what else we can do with it, take it to the next level; I think that’s what we’ve got to do.”Asked by interviewer Jo Whalley if that might mean a move away from rock’n’roll, Bono replied, “We’re gonna continue to be a band, but maybe the rock will have to go; maybe the rock has to get a lot harder. But whatever it is, it’s not gonna stay where it is.”

He went on to reveal he’d like U2 to explore compositions featuring just voice and acoustic guitar. “I would like to do a couple of tunes in that direction, with just a lot of space around the voice,” he said. “I’d like to strip things down; that’s something I’d be very interested in at the moment.”

See full Billboard article here.

This excerpt is taken from Colson’s breakpoint and interview with Mark Steyn, author of America Alone:The End of the World as We Know

“[Radical] Islam is a weak enemy, and its strength is determined by what it’s pushing against.” The problem is that Europe and, increasingly, America are putting up very little resistance. If Christians won’t stand up for our worldview, and secularists won’t stand up for anything, one day we may have no one but ourselves to blame for the triumph of radical Islam. The greatest offense against aggressive Islam is a strong, vibrant Christian faith, which, of course, comes right down to you and me.”

Steyn’s thesis is that Christianity is collapsing in Europe–and possibly sooner than later in America–because secularist Europe looks down on religion, offering its citizens “a robust confident Islamic identity or a tentative post-nationalist cringingly apologetic European identity.” How will we respond to this clarion call for robust, worldviewish Christianity?

How Children Raise Parents, Dan Allender – Allender approaches the topic of parenting from bottom up–parents, then children or parents through children. If we have the right influences or the right principles, won’t our kids turn out right? Allender avers that these are myths that many parents have been taught to believe, and then pass onto their children. He charts a third way, which includes wisdom, embraces failure and suffering, and requires the gospel of Christ. Our children need to witness strength (discipline) and mercy (love), which flow from God through us and point back to God.

Grace-Based Parenting, Tim Kimmel – Recommended by Ross Appleton, father of three, and someone who is striving to model suffering, strength, and mercy to his kids. I just picked it up, but it seems to be heading off legalistic, rule-driven parenting by making grace, not fear the motivation for family harmony and obedience.

Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Superheroes, and Make Believe-Violence, Gerard Jones – Journalist, cultural critic, and contributor to the recent success of Pokemon, Spider-man, and Batman, Jones draws on psychology, parenting, sociology and comicbook creation to address the issue of fantasy violence among children. Should we allow our kids to pretend to kill one another with plastic light-sabers? What of the virtual violence so easily accessible through computer games and X-box? Do these experiences enable children to take control of their anxieties, access their emotions, and lift themselves to new developmental levels?

The Disappearance of Childhood, Neil Postman – Perhaps known best for his conservative critque of our entertainment culture (Amusing Ourselves to Death), in this work Postman turns his penetrating vision toward Western culture’s impact on childhood. Children too quickly become adults through various mature, post-puberty influences–sex charged TV and film, etc. Intriguingly, Postman argues that the division between child and adult is a relatively new one, one that was largely the product of sociology, not biology…

Feel free to add some suggested titles under the “comments”…

This year I have partnered with a good friend to read through the Bible in a year. We are using D. A. Carson’s For the Love of God (vols. 1&2), which is based onthe McCheyne Reading Plan(this is the same plan Robert Coleman required in the 12 person discipleship course I took in seminary), reading through the OT once and Psalms and NT twice. Carson offers a one page reflection for each day of the year with the aim of enlightening the reader to the text and enlivening the heart for God.