Flotsam and jetsam (weekend edition)

• Lifehacker discusses how the “hive mind” can cause you to do almost anything.

We generally like to think of ourselves as individuals and appreciate our unique qualities, but when thrown into a group we can become very different people. Ideas and actions can spread like viruses until your individuality is completely wiped away. This is called deindividuation and here’s how it works.

• Ed Stetzer summarizes his series on the 7 Top Issues Church Planters Face.

If you are a planter, let me encourage you to think long-term. Don’t make the mistake of focusing on the 7 for a few months and then dropping them. Most of these issues have no quick fix-solution and will have impact on your influence as long as you are planting.

• iMonk reflects on the art of doing nothing.

Lazy? Who has time to be lazy? Of course, there are the verses that speak to laziness. By my count, there are fourteen such verses in Proverbs alone, starting with “Go to the ant, you sluggard!” So, can it actually be right to think that laziness is a way to the Lord?

• Michael Hyatt comments on The Number One Way Leaders Get Derailed.

Recently, I wrote about how leaders must learn to handle criticism and overlook offenses. I think this is the number one way that leaders can get derailed and rendered ineffective.

• The Spectator argues for the value of studying Latin in school. (HT) (Here’s a similar post from First Things on the value of studying biblical languages.)

Hard as it may be to believe, one of the things that gives privately-educated children the edge is their knowledge of Latin….I mean there is actually a substantial body of evidence that children who study Latin outperform their peers when it comes to reading, reading comprehension and vocabulary, as well as higher order thinking such as computation, concepts and problem solving.

• Christianity Today discusses 2010 movies that echo the theme of hope.

• Justin Taylor offers a crash course on “union with Christ.”

• Craig Keener accepts a position at Asbury Seminary.

• Stuart notes an interesting post answering the question, How Much Information Is There in the World?

• LifeWay is dropping its controversial “Read with Discernment” program, in which it placed warning labels on books it considered theologically questionable (e.g. The Shack).

• Two burglars fleeing police in in Columbia were caught when they accidentally broke into a jail.

• Here’s a list of 10 Great US Marines. And, as a bonus list, here are 10 Famous People Who Didn’t Actually Exist.

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The tyranny of individualism in interpretation

Kent Eilers posted a nice quote from D.H. Williams, warning about the Protestant tendency to emphasize individual Bible reading so much that we end up with individual “popes,” each with their own authoritative interpretation. The quote ends like this:

 It is a Pyrrhic victory for Free church Protestantism when the net effect of its teaching results in the replacing of the tyranny of the magisterium with the tyranny of individualism [Retrieving the Tradition, Renewing Evangelicalism (Eerdmans, 1999), p. 201]

You can read the full post and comments over at Theology Forum.