Is it already time for end-of-the-year “best of” lists?

Movies, music, books – they all become grist for the mill in our attempt to reflect on what the last twelve months has meant.

The New York Times posted their “100 Notable Books of 2009″ list this afternoon. I am familiar with the majority of the non-fiction books, but am without a clue in the fiction category. I think the editors have done a good job picking out great books that deserve to be read. Three notable ones from the list:

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew Crawford

Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend by Larry Tye

Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir by Christopher Buckley

I would love to know which books of 2009 made your “best of” list. They may not be on the NYT’s list, but what book(s) impacted, taught, or entertained you this  year?

With cold weather and shorter daylight hours upon us once again, I have been putting extra thought into my winter season fathering of sons.

It is one thing to create fun and mind-enriching activities during favorable weather, but opportunities are more limited during cabin fever season.

We are working our way through board and card games – Yahtzee, Uno, Connect Four, Go Fish – and over the weekend bought a fresh copy of the classic “Sorry” board game at Target.

Then I saw this new board game – “Boys Are Stupid.”

Taking the “battle of the sexes” to the 10-12 year old market segment, the game is described as:

Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them—but first you need to collect the rocks

Do a wacky dare or answer an embarrassing truth to get 5 rocks and work your way home to win the game

The perfect slumber party game for girls of all ages

Also great for after a break-up or as an anti-Valentine’s Day gift

Wow. I think we’ll stick with Monopoly, the Star Wars edition.

Sci-fi capitalism trumps low-brow feminism any day of the week.

To be a Christian in the midst of an urban area is to come face to face with the challenge of ministry and mercy to the poor. Bringing both the gospel and physical help to those on the lowest economic rungs of society takes an abundant amount of spiritual and material resources.

“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me.” (Matthew 25:35-36 ESV)

Here is one such story from my own backyard here in Louisville, Kentucky – the Jefferson Street Baptist Center in Louisville. Even with budget cutbacks this year, the center made the decision to turn down a grant of $50,000 from the U.S. government because of restrictions that would have been placed on the free sharing of the Gospel.

“Whenever we don’t reach budget, our gifts to them have to be cut back,” Pitts pointed out.

But it was its commitment to sharing the gospel that dealt Jefferson Street its most significant financial blow.

Over the summer, Ferguson and the shelter’s board of directors declined to accept a $50,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The grant represented 10 percent of Jefferson Street’s $500,000 budget.

Accepting the grant would have meant restrictions on sharing the gospel, Ferguson said.

While not much of a concern for the center’s day shelter—which serves nearly 250 people daily—the restrictions would have adversely affected the Jefferson Street’s recently retooled Fresh Start program.

Fresh Start is a discipleship program that helps male residents at Jefferson Street break cycles of addictions and bad decisions through Scripture.

New York Magazine has a fascinating article—”The Abortion Distortion: Just How Pro-Choice is America, Really?“—that among other things, looks at the way even abortion providers feel abortion’s moral weight. While the writer Jennifer Senior supports abortion, she looks at America’s discomfort with abortion, the fact that Americans now seem more eager to label themselves pro-life, the statistics that show that crisis pregnancy centers now outnumber abortion providers, and legislation that has shifted public opinion towards valuing life. Even abortion providers recognize that the issue isn’t as neat as their rhetoric might lead you to believe:

And if you want to hear honest talk about the realities of abortion, go speak with those abortion counselors and providers. Even the most radically pro-choice will tell you that the political discourse they hear about the subject, with its easy dichotomies and bumper-sticker boilerplate, has little correspondence to the messy, intricate stories of her patients. They hear about peace and guilt, relief and sin. And it is they who will acknowledge, whether we like it or not, that the rhetoric and imagery of the pro-life movement can touch on some basic emotional truths. Peg Johnston, who manages Access for Women in upstate New York, remembers the first time her patients unconsciously began to co-opt the language of the protesters outside. “And it wasn’t that these protesters were brainwashing them,” she says. “It’s that they were tapping into things we all have some discomfort about.”

The gap between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve is the period that I contemplate my investment strategy for the upcoming year. After a second helping of green bean casserole on Thursday, I turned on the computer to find that Dubai is in trouble, the price of gold plunged, and the value of the dollar surged due to spooked investors. Wild swings in investment markets driven by arcane bits of financial news and easy money are commonplace today. How should the average Joe and Jane make investment plans in this environment?

First of all, I recommend heeding my old economics professor’s advice—pay attention to money supply. I’ll save you a lot of time—the dot.com boom and bust as well as the real estate boom and bust were driven by lots of excess cash created out of thin air by the Federal Reserve. This frothy money flowed into the previously mentioned sectors and set the stage for booms and eventual busts. In response to the 2008 market crisis, the Fed pumped even more money into the financial markets. And various sectors are bubbling again.

OK, so the money supply is a mess. Where do we go from there as we make our plans?

Consider deflation. Thanks to the Fed, there’s lots of extra cash in banks and they’re not loaning it out. Why? Banks are either nervous thinking that more bad loans may go belly-up and they’ll need cash to cover their losses, or there just aren’t many viable business loans to make. If the bad loan scenario comes true, expect a period of falling prices driven by business and mortgage failures as well as panicked consumers hanging onto their cash. Believing this deflation scenario could play out, what should an investor do? Do the opposite of Dubai—get out of debt, save, and conserve your cash.

Consider inflation. What if the good times are right around the corner? In a recovery, banks will start to make loans again. Believe it or not, banks can also create money because they only need to keep a small amount of cash in reserve. Typically, they can loan money in a 10-l loan to reserve ratio. And they could create a lot of cash because the Federal Reserve pumped an unprecedented amount into the system following the 2008 crisis. If banks start loaning again and the Federal Reserve doesn’t remove the excess funds from the system fast enough (they usually don’t), look for inflation to set in. So how does an investor prepare? Consider inflation-sensitive investments such as commodities. This is why traditional inflation hedges like gold have been surging. When the news about Dubai came out, the price of gold dropped $60 an ounce. But the price rebounded significantly because inflation investors saw the drop as a buying opportunity.

Consider potential busts. For example, the Federal Reserve has been using its printing press to buy government bonds, which is keeping prices artificially high. If interest rates start to go up, beware. Bond prices could fall. Are there other bubbles out there? Sure, beware.

We’re living in a time when financial news from the tiny emirate of Dubai shakes world markets. Translation: The average Joe and Jane need to be very wise with their investments. In my opinion, the rough ride isn’t over yet. Consider inflation, deflation, and bust scenarios and position yourself to be a good steward of your assets.

British Conservative party leader David Cameron is looking to mop up in spring elections and become the United Kingdom’s new prime minister.

Joe Loconte – King’s College visiting professor who lives in the lovely city of Washington – writes at National Review today that American conservatives should look to the example set by their British counterparts.

Cameron electrified Conservatives by excoriating the excesses of big government — “the state is your servant, never your master” — and its assault on personal responsibility. He drew his biggest applause line, though, when he scolded the Labour party for its inability to help Britain’s most marginalized and at-risk groups. “Don’t you lecture us about poverty,” he said. “You have failed, and it falls to us, the modern Conservative party, to fight for the poorest who you have let down.”

Cameron, Loconte explains, sees the “less government” idea as consistent with serving the poor. The poor are best served, Cameron believes, by families, churches, and nonprofits.

Cameron’s strategy will be a hard sell to American conservatives who think George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” quickly morphed into another federal boondoggle. It becomes more plausible, though, when combined with a robust reform agenda that insists upon local government and private-sector initiatives over distant, bloated bureaucracies.

Give the piece a read. What do you think?

According to a poll conducted by”60 Minutes” and Vanity Fair magazine:

By a wide margin, Americans consider Rush Limbaugh the nation’s most influential conservative voice.  …The radio host was picked by 26 percent of those who responded, followed by Fox News Channel’s Glenn Beck at 11 percent. Actual politicians – former Vice President Dick Cheney and former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin – were the choice of 10 percent each.

I happen to know a lot of people in prison. We have a councilman in Philadelphia who will do about 55 months for decades of siphoning millions of taxpayer dollars into his pocket—less time if he gets into a drug program in the joint. And I know an inmate who is doing 12 to 22 years for taking a handful of drugs from a drugstore with an unloaded gun, in a state that happens to have a “truth in sentencing” law, which means no time off for good behavior.

And then there’s God. Perfect justice:

“The Lord works righteousness and justice for all who are oppressed” (Psalm 103:6).

In Genesis, Abraham knew God’s character and was not afraid to make an appeal in the matter of Sodom’s destruction on the basis of His justice:

“Shall not the judge of all the earth do what is just?” (Genesis 18:25).

Sometimes even God’s best people don’t understand his justice:

“Righteous are you, O Lord, when I complain to you; yet I would plead my case before you. Why does the way of the wicked prosper? Why do all who are treacherous thrive?” (Jeremiah 12:1).

But for myself, I trust in the Lord in spite of the things I don’t understand about Him—because of the things I do understand about Him. And one of those things is that He looks at the heart of a matter and not just external appearances. Every one of us knows what it’s like to be in a situation that looks really, really bad, but onlookers are unaware of a few facts that would unfurl their eyebrows if they knew. What about the poor guy who walks into church on Sunday morning filthy because he stopped to help someone on the way who had a flat tire? I have been so sleep-deprived that I have nodded visibly through very good sermons.

God knows all that stuff. But mortals jump to conclusions. And mortals generally don’t distinguish between evil intent and innocence if their new Ferrari gets hit from the rear.

Therefore, as we learn in today’s chapter, God invented the cities of refuge, because there are extenuating circumstances in life. There were six cities of refuge scattered throughout Israel (for your convenience), and each was a place you could run to if you had killed a person accidentally, without malice aforethought. You didn’t get off scot-free because you still were forced to leave everyone and everything you knew and to go to a strange city and hang around there until the high priest died. But it was better than vigilante justice on the streets of Debir or Medeba. God once gave King David a choice of punishments: famine, fleeing from his foes, or pestilence. David didn’t miss a beat:

“Let us fall into the hand of the Lord, for his mercy is great; but let me not fall into the hand of man” (2 Samuel 24:14).

Today, of course, the cities of refuge are all done away with, superseded by the refuge that is in Christ:

“The name of the Lord is a strong tower; the righteous man runs into it and is safe” (Proverbs 18:10).

The better thing about this new place of refuge is that He even takes people who killed someone on purpose.

And unlike the prison system my correspondents are in, the chastisement is never a day too long or too short.

Read the next part in this series.

To hear commentaries by Andrée Seu, click here.

Good morning!

On this day in 1782: The United States and Britain signed preliminary peace articles in Paris, ending the Revolutionary War.

Welcome to our daily (except Sundays) open thread, where you, the commenters, choose the topics of conversation.

On “black Friday,” I didn’t stand in line at 4 in the morning for a $99 Blue Ray player, nor did I run through Walmart aisles on my way to a $9 toaster.

But I did venture out in search of a new computer for the family – preferably one that doesn’t spontaneously shut itself off in the middle of a writing project.

While in the “big box” venues of high dollar electronic consumerism, I noticed that the sales clerks seemed very connected to their jobs – literally. Various cellular communication technologies seemed to be giving the sales team instant access to management, the stock room, the affiliated store across town, and even to customers who were considering coming out to the store.

The New York Times noticed all the technology and social-media interaction going on:

Once upon a time, people mailed their holiday wishes to the North Pole and hoped for a reply on Christmas Day. Nowadays they are sending their wishes into cyberspace and are apt to get a reply in minutes.

America’s first Twitter Christmas got under way in earnest on Friday. Across the land, retailers and their customers used the social networking site to talk to one another about bargains, problems, purchases and shopping strategies.

In Bloomington, Minn., Mall of America used its Twitter page to tell consumers two of its parking areas were at capacity and that their best bet was to park near Ikea. Twitter permits public communication via short, to-the-point messages. Many people use it to send mundane updates to their friends, but increasingly, the nation’s retailers see it as a business tool.

Did anyone else notice this while out shopping?