Odds and sods

David Kyozis takes a look at friendship.  His first post is here.

Rattlesnake6 looks at what Herman Bavinck had to say about revelation and culture. He warns:

There is a movement afoot today for Christians to be more involved in culture and cultural activities. I applaud that initiative and hope and pray that more Christians will become truly involved with “the arts.” I have a proviso, though. As Christians engage in “the arts” they will not jettison, compromise, or neglect good theology in the process. ...

It is unwise, according to Bavinck, to go off half-cocked or with some half-baked notion of engaging the culture. First and foremost, he challenges us to do justice to the rights and requirements of the Christian confession.

Not sure what novel to read next? Then try whichbook.net to find some suggestions.

Losing the Big Picture: How Religion May Control Visual Attention by Lorenza S. Colzato1, Wery P. M. van den Wildenberg and Bernhard Hommel1:

Abstract

Despite the abundance of evidence that human perception is penetrated by beliefs and expectations, scientific research so far has entirely neglected the possible impact of religious background on attention. Here we show that Dutch Calvinists and atheists, brought up in the same country and culture and controlled for race, intelligence, sex, and age, differ with respect to the way they attend to and process the global and local features of complex visual stimuli: Calvinists attend less to global aspects of perceived events, which fits with the idea that people’s attentional processing style reflects possible biases rewarded by their religious belief system.