Written by God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply! Fill the earth, take care of it, harness its potential and use its resources for your benefit.”
Genesis 1.28 paraphrased
Things like commerce and economics, art and science, technology and agriculture are all expressions of human creativity and resourcefulness. Traits like these in us that reflect God and who He is. When those who bear God’s Image get together with other Image Bearers, the result is civilization, ingenuity and a variety of ideas. It’s because we have dominion over Creation that we can do this. In fact, it’s pretty much expected that people do this.
Of course, fallenness and sin come in and contaminate everything and all we’re left with are poor, distorted reflections even in the best of human achievement. I fully expect that in the New Earth, without the obstacles that sin and death present to advancement, we’ll fully see the fullest and eternal fruits of all human civilizations in ever expanding and ever deepening ways all centered on the glory of Jesus Christ.
All this explains why I have a healthy appreciation and enjoyment of humanity and what we’ve done. And I’m always happy to indulge with new “toys” now and then. In that regard, I thought it would be nice to give a few links that use myself that celebrate the Lord by compelling me to think deeply on Jesus, by using the latest in human technology. These are especially good because they give low cost alternatives to just going out an just buying a new book every time one strikes my fancy.
Gospel eBooks (http://www.gospelebooks.net) exists to provide free and discount books (fiction and non-fiction) for the Amazon Kindle. I have an embarrassingly huge collection of physical books, so I’ve tried to limit my reading to library books and to electronic media. I don’t have a Kindle yet myself, so I read through the Kindle apps on my iPhone and PC. It’s a simple site, easy to navigate and free. (Amazon itself offers similar informational services through the Kindle but they come with a monthly fee).
Gospel eBooks offers three flavors of book pricing:
- Ebooks that are free. These are typically daily specials offered by Amazon or the publishers directly, and may go back to the normal price at any time).
- Books that have a normal purchase price of $3 or less. These are full books too, not merely abridgements.
- Finally there are discounted books which are those that sell for 65% off of the normal Kindle price.
The site even has a nice article of bullet points why it’s a good idea to purchase a Kindle for yourself. Of course, I’m all for portable gadgets and e-reading, so I plan on getting a Kindle Touch for myself sometime this year. (I’m rather disappointed that they are still so expensive.)
Christian Audio (http://www.christianaudio.com/free) like many other ministries, tries to cultivate not just spiritual life in Christians, but spiritual thriving in Christians. It has a mission to build up Christians everywhere by helping them to think and believe properly through making quality Christian books available in audio format. Right now, it’s the largest Christian audio book website on the internet. The one thing that keeps drawing me back to the site, even though I’m more of a reader of books and not a listener of books, is the free monthly book. Every month, Christian Audio sells an audio book at a %100 discount for the entire month. I’m not sure how they choose, but in the three years I’ve known about this offer, I’ve not seen a book repeated at all.
I remember stumbling on the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (http://www.ccel.org) in my first few weeks of using the internet back in the late 90s so it seems to have been around for a long time. I think it was also my first exposure (though I didn’t know it then) to Wheaton, my college of choice. The CCEL is essentially a big digital library that provides access to Christian literature of the past.
I was once confronted by an anti-Protestant claiming that I was in a tradition without roots and with no connection to the “True Faith” merely by virtue that Protestant theology was all “derivative,” “self-deterministic” and “phoney” with no respect for or communion with the history of the true church, and therefore I had no place in calling myself a Christian in any regard.
While it’s true that modern American Christians (at least) have little idea that they are standing on the shoulders of brothers and sisters that have come before, I was adamant that it was not a function of Protestant theology but how Western civilization had developed. I walked to CCEL, and after a brief talk with Augustine and the Church Fathers, Thomas Aquinas, Calvin and other Reformers, John Bunyan, the Puritans and other champions of Christianity, came away with a notion that I was justified in my thoughts, but saddened how we really do have a disconnect with our history as Christians. Sometimes it seems that Christians have no reckoning of anything that happened from AD 90 to 1950.
Most of the literature offered at the CCEL isn’t necessarily for light reading, as the language can seem archaic and difficult to parse through for the modern reader. But all files there are offered in multiple formats, some free, some at a reasonable cost, and many can be viewed in a web browser or an e-reader.
I think one of the best aspects of CCEL is how it includes not just Protestant literature, but Catholic and Eastern Orthodox literature as a way of holding to its philosophy that Christians need to expose themselves to a wide variety of perspectives on the truth of God to be spiritually healthy. It’s definitely worth checking out their Recommended Reading (http://www.ccel.org/shortlist.html).
I hope these provide some good resources, I know they’ve helped me out since finding them myself.
