Notes from a Small Place #10
Hey all,
Here is the latest.
First, I would appreciate your prayers today as I have three different interviews scheduled to promote Common Good. The first is a morning show on My Faith radio that airs in Minnesota and the Dakotas. By the time you get this I'll already be done with that one. Then I'm recording two podcasts later today, one with the Catalyst podcast and the other with Daniel Darling of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.
I also have three more interviews scheduled for next week and may have a fourth in the works as well. Please pray for stamina to get through all these—I enjoy them, but it's a new thing for me and often in the past I've struggled with live interviews.
Reading
I'm going back over Benedict XVI's encyclical Caritas in Veritate as I do work on the second book. Catholic social teaching is legit, y'all. (But most of you already know this.)
I'm also finishing up Brent Waters' Just Capitalism later this week.
The fun personal reading is that Davy Joy and I have started on the Harry Potter books.
Food
I attempted my first brisket on the Fourth. Main takeaway: You'll trim the brisket and feel terrified that you've trimmed too much and it will be dry. You are probably wrong. I should've trimmed much more because it was fairly fatty when we sliced into it. The internal temp got up to 205 and I held it for two hours after smoking for 13 so I think the cook was fine. I just didn't trim enough.
That said, we had brisket slices on the fourth, the kids had chopped beef for lunch one day, and we did brisket tacos over the weekend and all of that was great. For the tacos, we had corn tortillas, a sweet and sour slaw (recipe), salsa, and a bit of grated cheese. Highly recommended.
The other food news: We're enjoying having a few more food newsletters arriving in our inbox these days. I made these almond flour snickerdoodles that Gracy Olmstead shared in her newsletter. If you haven't subscribed, you should do something about that.
Joie also made the pesto that Alissa Wilkinson wrote about in her newsletter. You should subscribe to that too.
Other News
The Mere O Mailer is live. You can read past issues and subscribe here.
Awkward programming note: So you probably know about what happened to Tish Warren. Amazon sold a quarter million dollars worth of faked copies of her book, costing IVP a great deal in sales and Tish a fair amount in royalties. You can read Tish's blog to find out what you can do to figure out if you have a pirated copy of the book. (Also: Head on over and buy a copy of the book from IVP's website. I promise you won't regret it.)
Here's the problem: Because of the way things have worked out in Christian publishing, Christian authors really are dependent on Amazon in some fairly entrenched ways. Byron Borger's Facebook note explains how all this happened so if you want to learn more, start there.
So while I would encourage you to buy the book from IVP or from Byron at Hearts and Minds Books, in the interim authors like me still cannot totally extricate ourselves from Amazon.
That's all preamble for this simple request: If you've read Common Good, would you be willing to leave a review on the Amazon page? Amazon does bias their algorithm toward reviews from people who purchased the book through Amazon, but even if you didn't buy it through them (and, frankly, I would much prefer that you buy it from Byron) you can still write a review. The launch has gone really well overall, but the one thing that hasn't gone as we'd like is the lack of Amazon reviews. So getting some more reviews up for the book would be helpful. Thanks in advance! (Also: If you publish a review, email me and I'll enter you in the launch contest drawing.)
Other Notes
One question I've been thinking about more lately, though it's never that far from my mind: Faithfulness in friendship is a precious thing. I'm going to be on my annual weekend retreat with my college friends from RUF in a couple weeks. We had our first retreat in 2009 and have met every year since.
At our first gathering, only two of us were married and none of us had kids. Now 10 of 11 are married and we're at around 20 kids (I've lost track of the exact number, to be honest). We've also had three of our number whose wives have had cancer, including one whose cancer is terminal. (Eric and Elizabeth spoke about her cancer at the church where Eric pastors.)
I only know of one other group like ours. My brother-in-law has a similar group of friends, though his are from seminary, that also meets up once a year. But that group aside, I don't know of another group of men who have been friends long-term and continue to be involved in each other's lives.
If you have any opportunity whatsoever to cultivate such a group, do it. I'm not sure what I'd do without that group. And if you do have friends like that or a group like that, thank God for it and maybe also let your friends know how grateful you are for them.
One last item: Pray for your pastors. One of my friends and I were talking yesterday and he was relaying to me how hard the past year of ministry has been for him. He's been a pastor for many years now and yet it hasn't gotten easier for him; it's much harder now, I think.
Church life is difficult for everyone, of course. And sometimes we have to have hard conversations with pastors or we need to get coffee with them to talk through something really difficult. That's OK. It's part of their job. But don't forget to be thankful for them. And when you think of it, shoot them an email just to say "thanks" for their ministry. I think there are a lot of good pastors in our churches who need encouragement.
Thanks for reading, everyone. More next week.