I'm at the beach this week with my family for a bit of vacation. I can't help but think about how such vacations speak to the lack of balance in most of my life.

The BBC recently released a story of a 13 year old who gave up his iPod for a week in order to use a Walkman.  For those of you who have no idea what that is, a Walkman is a portable cassette tape player that some peopl eused to carry their music on about 20 years ago. They came in many styles, but they were all called "Walkman" after the original Sony product in the 80's that brought portable stereo music to so many people.

The Wall Street Journal has posted a review of an upcoming book of interest:  Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine, by Peter J. Thuesen.

For some, it is deeply comforting to know that, before all time, God decreed who will be saved and who will be damned without regard to individual merit, relieving fallen humanity of an impossible burden. For others, like Dow, absolute predestination is a cruel scholasticism that turns God into an arbitrary tyrant and the author of sin, denying individuals the ability to co-operate in their own salvation and making a mockery of the Gospel call to repentance.