My friend Brian has updated Pilgrim Without A Shrine (it’s about time dude!) with a brain dump of life in Jordan.  Some good stuff, including a paradigm-shifting way to think about Palestinian gun smuggling and bomb making.  Two key questions:

Are they patriots, terrorists, or victims of their particular place and time in history?

On a broader scale, what determines our sense of pride or dismay at the stories we hear of youth involved in war and warlike activities?

I’ve added a frequent (as of late) commenter on this blog to the sidebar list of “regular reading.”  Stanford Gibson is an acquaintance through Brian and I can think of no good way to describe his blog, A Fiercer Delight and a Fiercer Discontent. He only updates a few times a month but when he does… look out.  There are a few reasons you should visit this blog: 1) The guy is smart.  From a recent post about the Eucharist: “But by celebrating the Lord’s Supper weekly, you are never far from rehearsing the gospel. The vicarious substitutionary atonement is the central insight into humanness that Christianity claims to offer.”  2) He uses hyperlinked footnotes in each post.  Seriously.  3) His recent categorization of The Decemberists as “the quintessential postmodern band.”  Funny, but spot-on.  4) Each post ends with a description of what music was listened to while being written.

Both of these blogs may be just the ecclectic insight your RSS reader is looking for.