signsoflifebooks.com

While supplies last, you can come into our store in downtown Lawrence and get a free gift with purchase!

When you spend $50 or more with us during any visit this Christmas season, you’ll receive a complimentary copy of The Shine Man, a charming Christmas tale for children of all ages. Or you can purchase the book on sale for 50% off the list price of $17.

If your purchases total $70 or more, then our gift to you is this book of poetry: The Green Earth, by Luci Shaw. Shaw’s book of creation poems is also on sale. Regularly $20, while supplies last it is only $10. Both these books are great gift ideas!

Christmas Festival 2006! During the Christmas season, Signs of Life will present 12 events during 12 days before Christmas. There will be carol singing, Christmas-card making, music of all sorts, even a readers theater of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. For details, view the flyer, or check out our calendar. Also, look for the flyer as an insert in today’s Lawrence Journal-World newspaper.

Actually they call today Black Friday. Sounds like a stock market crash or something. I never heard the term until I got into retail. It is supposed to indicate that the day after Thanksgiving is the day when retailers go into the black for the year. Because everybody knows its the biggest retail day of the year, right? Well, sorta. It’s the biggest day of the year for the biggest retailers. The big box stores and big mall stores do pretty well today. But your local independent retailers have to wait until shoppers get fed up with big crowds and indifferent service. Then they come back to stores like Signs of Life where you get reasonable prices and great service from people who care. We’re getting harder and harder to find. I wonder why that is?

It’s a glorious day to give thanks to God from whom all blessings flow! President Abraham Lincoln, in proclaiming the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father noted that, our “. . . Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.” The depth of that mercy is highlighted by the fact that Lincoln’s proclamation was written in the midst of a national struggle that makes our current skirmish in Iraq pale in comparison. To read Lincoln’s entire text, click here.

Our first lecture in the Culinary Culture series was by Tim O’Brian, founder and cultivator of the St. John’s Organic Parish Garden who spoke on “Culinary Culture and Christian Stewardship”.  The video of his excellent presentation is now available for your on-line viewing pleasure here.

Author and historian Darryl Hart will speak at 7:30 pm tonight at the Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas. The title of his talk is “The Last Dance: Why the Romance between the Religious Right and American Conservatism May be Over.” Dr. Hart’s most recently published book, A Secular Faith: Why Christianity Favors the Separation between Church and State (September 2006) provides the backdrop for Hart’s analysis of evangelicals’ rise to power during the last 25 years.

This weekend Dr. Hart will be speaking locally at a conference on Christianity and Culture sponsored by the Aletheia Forum. His talk at the conference will also draw from another of his recent books, Deconstructing Evangelicalism. Sharing the podium with Dr. Hart will be Signs of Life friend Caleb Stegall as well as World Magazine managing editor Timothy Lamer.

Have you joined the growing club of coffee connoisseurs? Joe Farthing, local owner and roaster of J&S Coffee, discussed “The New Connoisseurship: Specialty Coffee and Tea Industries in the 21st Century” in our Public House lecture series recently (what is it?). You can watch a video of his talk here.

Bishop N.T. Wright is one of the most prolific Christian writers of our day. As a New Testament scholar and former Canon Theologian of Westminster Abbey, Wright’s work has received a wide reading from a variety of Christians: mainline to fundamentalist, emergent to high-church Anglicans. Yet as wide as his readership is, even the quickest readers cannot seem to keep up with his pace of writing and publishing. As one pastor put it, “N.T. Wright writes faster than I can read!”

Nevertheless, Wright serves as one of the foremost defenders of orthodox Christianity today. We carry several of Wright’s most recent and most respected titles. Simply Christian has merited reviews from many prominent periodicals, and has been lauded as this generation’s Mere Christianity (the classic work by C.S. Lewis), serving to simply, yet faithfully present an introduction to the historic message of Christianity.

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Caleb Stegall, editor of The New Pantagruel, gave a talk in our Culinary Culture series on “Culinary Politics: Prairie Uprisings and Agricultural Revolts in Kansas History”. This fascinating presentation centered around the farm economy of the 1890s in Kansas and might challenge us to rethink our modern political labels of “conservative” and “liberal”. The talk was videotaped and is available now to view online.

For most modern Americans, the idea of rest or leisure sounds more like something to indulge in, or spoil themselves with, rather than a lifestyle. Take a look at the ads in any magazine or newspaper promoting various spa and health products, vacations, or other products meant for relaxation and you will find a reoccurring theme: “Take a break, you deserve it,” or “Indulge yourself with this special treat today, you’ve earned the break,” or “Escape with us on this cruise, leave the pager behind.” Rest and recreation is seen as an escape from reality—it is something we earn in two-weeks-a-year units. Our rest is defined by our work, not the other way around. Productivity is the highest goal, not leisure, not rest.

But as James Schall argues in his recent book, On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs, this modern approach to life is a grave departure from the Classical and Christian views of work, leisure, and rest. In Unseriousness, regarded as worthy successor to Josef Pieper’s classic work, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Schall describes leisure not as the escape from the dreary reality of our work demands, but as the natural extension of work which is the context for the highest duties of man. True leisure is the time for contemplating the highest things and participating in the grand activity of play in a way that expresses that which is truest about both our nature and God’s nature.

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