Ben Crowder

Excited to see yesterday’s Church Newsroom post about the upcoming changes to the Sunday class meeting schedule. While the new schedule doesn’t give a lot of time for lessons, I think the consistency — same schedule each week — is important, as is the follow-on effect of each organization gathering together every week instead of every other. Less of a preparation burden for teachers on any given day, too, now that lessons/discussions are only half as long. (I say this as one who always worrie...

I’ve been reading through my journals from twenty years ago, remembering old friends and who I used to be and what I worried about when I was young and single. And goodness, I had forgotten just how much I used to blog back then. Perhaps to excess (and by “perhaps” I mean “without a doubt”), but it was fun and I made lots of friends and I find myself missing it. [He says on his blog, where he has posted twenty-three times this year so far.] [He wants to point out, though, that the booknotes a...

Inspired by Jo Walton’s post about reading sixteen books at once, here are my own reading habits, for those who have trouble falling asleep at night. I generally read between four and ten books at a time, though at times it’s gone as low as two and as high as, uh, thirty. (Those were wild days.) For me it’s a balance between finishing books — where fewer at a time helps — and reading across more of my areas of interest in parallel. Each day I try to read at least 100 pages. My loose goal is a...

The Merchant of Venice, by William Shakespeare, published 1596, play, 82 pages. I first read this twenty-five years ago but apparently retained almost none of it. Aside from the antisemitism, I generally liked it. Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President, by Candice Millard, published 2011, history, 368 pages. Loved it! The history — the assassination, the undiagnosed mental illness, the medical malpractice — is tragic and awful, of course, but the b...