WIP Wednesday, Yarn-Along, and Book Review: Young, Restless, Reformed

 You can tell it's back-to-school time.  I started two new quilting projects in the last week, and they are the heartbreakingly complex, hopeless to finish quickly kind.  This is the beginning of an idea I had to interpret Bonnie K. Hunter's Santa Fe String Star (from String Fling) in a rainbow progression.  I like scrappy quilts and all that, I just like them to be planned scrappy.  I think it could be a knockout, but I'll need a lot more string diamonds before I can start playing with all the colors.

And here are the pieces of the Bag End block from the Lord of the Rings "Not All Who Wander are Lost" quilt, by Fandom in Stitches.  It is the coolest, funnest idea for a quilt I've seen in awhile, and of course I choose the week before school starts to dive in!  It's what I was thinking about today while in the dentist's chair having a cavity filled, oh joy.

Knitting during Family Camp got me a bit further on Rosalind.  The back is done and the left front is half-done.  I don't think I'll be able to wear it for the first day of school though.

I've been plugging along on my second Circle of Fun rug.  Each segment has about 9 strands of reclaimed cotton or linen yarn from thrift store sweaters.  3 of them are the color of the segment; blue, yellow, or lime; and all the rest are white or off-white.  Kind of fun, mindless TV knitting.  5 more segments to go!

And I just finished reading Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist's Journey with the New Calvinists by Collin Hansen.  I found it quite enlightening as an exploration of a cultural phenomenon that most of us who have always been Reformed have encountered but that is poorly understood.  Hansen pays particular attention to the enduring legacy of Jonathan Edwards - although the halls of Yale have drifted far from Edwards' Christian vision, still his spiritual descendants are thriving in some unexpected places.  Among the living Calvinist leaders Hansen interviews are John Piper, Al Mohler, and Mark Driscoll.  All of them have very different styles and personalities and are called to serve in diverse locations, but the common thread is there, and the story of how that commonality was discovered is fascinating.  I particularly appreciated the exploration of the tensions
(and they do exist) between the old-guard and the titular newly-converted, most of whom come from Baptist or non-denominational backgrounds that do not necessarily have a rich theological heritage.  This is, of course, the very thing that most likely attracts them about Calvinism.  It makes sense -- I'm a strong advocate of giving young people challenging subjects to study, so why not in theology as well?  Hansen is a fair and knowledgeable journalist, able to explain some of the basic points of Reformed theology in a way that most outsiders would be able to understand, while still giving enough gritty detail to amuse us old-timers. 

I have to love the fact that Calvinism is now trending.  It's almost enough to make me sign up for a Twitter account.