I’m a gadget nerd whose Verizon contract is almost up so I’m shopping for my next phone. Here’s an ad from HTC.

Tim Keller quotes Tom Shippey in Counterfeit Gods as calling Sauron’s ring in The Lord of the Rings “a psychic amplifier”. They take our heart’s good desires and amplify them to idolatrous proportions (pg. [...]

A trending hashtag—or popular topic label—on Twitter this week was “failed children’s book titles.” (You can search the hashtag here, but be warned that many of the tweets with that tag have been offensive; here are a few of my favorites—all clean.) The idea was to take a familiar children’s book title and change a [...]

Use of mobile.biblegateway.com on an average Sunday morning, according to Bible Gateway
When I saw this chart (which I found via my TC colleague David Ker at futurebible) I could hear the alarmists worrying out loud: Using cell phones and blackberries in church! Is nothing—or no place—sacred anymore? It reminded me of this article on how [...]

(Robert Keeley is a guest blogger for Think Christian.  Learn more about him here.)
A recent article on MSNBC points out the role of religion in the lives and careers of the contestants on American Idol.  According to the article more than half of the 11 finalists in the competition have “regularly performed at places of [...]

The number one paid app for the iPhone right now is a game called “Pocket God.” For $0.99, you are promised that you can understand what it would be like to be a god.
Here’s how the game’s creators tout the app.
What kind of god would you be?  Benevolent or vengeful? Play Pocket God and discover [...]

Is anyone else amazed at what U2 can get away with?
The band has a new album out and appeared on David Letterman every night last week. On Tuesday, they played a song called “Magnificent” which reads like Old Testament Psalm:
Magnificent!
Magnificent!
I was born, I was born to be with you
In this Space and Time,
after that, the [...]

Phil Vischer—you know, the VeggieTales guy—recently announced he’s getting back into Christian media. How, you ask? Well, he’s launching a kids media studio that will distribute exclusively on the internet through a monthly subscription service.
Oh, and you get to pick your price.
It’s just crazy enough to work.
He explains how and why in the video below [...]

A few random links that crossed my path this week:

Who really cares? A new book finds that religious conservatives tend to be more generous with their time and money than the popular stereotype suggests.
The best internet marketing blog posts of 2007. Lots of free marketing ideas and advice for your church, ministry, or website there. [...]

I’m struggling to write a disclaimer for The Brick Testament. The concept is reasonable enough: retell Bible stories using legos; however, the end result isn’t always as harmless as a 1/100th scale Millenium Falcon.
On one hand, The Brick Testament is a rather accurate depiction of the bible, but the bible isn’t exactly PC by everyone’s [...]

Some fascinating works of art from The Glue Society.
The Glue Society’s co-founder, Jonathan Kneebone, said: “Art has always depicted religious events and this is simply a new way to do it.
“We’re playing with the whole idea that if you capture something from a satellite it must exist.”
He described the images as a “digital jigsaw puzzle” [...]