Jon Acuff's Blog, page 172

Last Friday, I found myself engaged in an epic struggle with Stephen Hawking. The Professor Moriarty to my Sherlock Holmes, the Cobra Kai to my Karate Kid, Hawking and I were at odds, but not for the reason you might imagine.

Stephen Hawking and I were engaged in a popularity contest.

Turns out CNN.com wrote an article about Stuff Christians Like. And it was the second most popular article on CNN.com that day…behind Stephen Hawking. So, much like a cobra and a mongoose, we circled each other...

I'm in Atlanta trying to sell our house. (I am about 15 minutes away from becoming one of those dancing sign wavers that sub shops hire.)

I'll be back tomorrow and so will Stuff Christians Like.

Have a great Labor Day! (International folks, I hope your Monday is delightful too.)

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I just changed jobs last month. I changed states too.

I'm now a writer/speaker for Dave Ramsey. I live in Franklin, Tennessee. (Which is like Nashville's older, cooler brother).

But how about you? What do you do for a living and where do you do it?

No pressure, I'm just curious and thought I would ask a short Saturday question.

So, what do you do and where do you call home?

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Based on the number of comments, here are the 5 most popular posts on Stuff Christians Like from August.

1. Reacting to Anne Rice.

2. Sex.

3. Finding a New Church

4. Twitter

5. Having a "Life Verse"

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If you've never experienced a handball choir, then you my friend are missing out on some white gloved awesomeness. Growing up in Massachusetts, I never saw a handbell choir. (Do they have them out West? Is this only a Southern thing?) But when I went to Samford University for college I was enthralled. It just seems like a pretty arbitrary instrument to make a choir from. Why not a triangle choir or a tambourine choir? How did we settle on handbells? (Please insert your own cow bell joke....

My wife is on her third iPhone 4 in six days.

The first one had a hardware and software failure.

The second one sounded like an old timey cotton gin. It was so loud she held it up to our landline at home when she was on the phone with Apple support and they urged her to bring it in. Immediately.

The third one? We'll see.

The worst part is that she holds me responsible. Because I've had one for a year and like Apple, she assumes that I might have hand built these defective iPhones. She'll call me ...

Life is like a hurricane, here in Duckburg.

Race cars, lasers, aeroplanes, it's a duck-blur.

Might solve a mystery or rewrite history …

If you grew up like I did, you know the next words that to gem of a song. It's "DuckTales, ooohhh, ooohhh." That's the chorus to the show DuckTales. My wife bought volume 1&2 on DVD for the move up to Franklin, Tennessee and my kids have loved them. And why shouldn't they? That song is the jam. I hope someday that Timbaland and Justin Timberlake will do a...

"Jonathan Acuff betrays America with Anti-Christian article."

That was the title of a post that was written in response to a CNN article I wrote. In the post the author ripped me apart, questioning my love of democracy, apple pie and freedom.

But I think it was a joke. It has to be, it was so over the top and hateful that I have to assume they were just joshing. (I'm bringing the words, "joshing" and "no doy," back by the way.)

My biggest clue that it was a joke was that they didn't use the...

I was a big fan of Anne Jackson's first book, Mad Church Disease. It was a gift to anyone who works in the ministry. That's why I'm excited about her second book, Permission to Speak Freely – Essays and Art on Fear, Confession and Grace which releases today.

Where her first book was for pastors, this book is for everyone. Anne was kind enough to share one of the essays from the book. Anne decided to share seven essays on seven different blogs, this being the second. To read the rest of the...

The other day, pop princess Katy Perry said something interesting:

"I think when you put sex and spirituality in the same bottle and shake it up, bad things happen."

I disagree.

Although that specific quote was about Lady Gaga, I think it's indicative of something much bigger and much worse. Put simply, our culture has divorced God from sex.

I've long said that popular culture often acts as if God might have invented humanity and thus sex, but he was completely caught off guard that sex was an...