Microblogging Friday

• Jesus taught from a boat, Philip used a chariot and Wesley preached from a gravestone.  But you’ve got to see the “Whale of a Pulpit” in this Pulpit Potpourri Post at Extraecclesiam

• I’m not sure which is more fascinating; the idea that NASA can send the Curiosity rover to Mars and take pictures and send them back, or the idea that we know so much about space that we can now look at some of those same photos and actually see ourselves in the picture; that we can look and say, “Hey, that’s us!”

• As if we weren’t already worried enough about environmental issues, our trip this week to Ithaca, New York and Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania taught us a new word: Fracking, a controversial process for extracting natural gas from beneath layers of rock. I was especially concerned to read, “Hydraulic fracturing has raised environmental concerns and is challenging the adequacy of existing regulatory regimes.These concerns have included ground water contamination, risks to air quality, migration of gases and hydraulic fracturing chemicals to the surface, mishandling of waste, and the health effects of all these…” I’m told somewhere in this movie, a family runs their tap water, and then lights a match to it, and the ‘water’ bursts into flame.

• Now for something lighter; like this one; Margaret Fishback Powers’ classic Footprints poem gets a slightly different treatment:

• Finally, something more substantial from author Graham Cooke’s Facebook page: “You live your life on a battlefield between God on the one side and the devil on the other. You don’t want to be helping the enemy. Fear, anxiety, panic and doubt all help the enemy against you. We must learn trust, thanksgiving, rejoicing and believing simply that God is good and that’s the end of it! When you feel like you’re in a fight for your life, the best way to approach it is as simply as possible.”