Assistant Editor Heather von Doehren shares a website she found while web-surfing (a.k.a procrastinating). 

I recently stumbled upon a site called Biblemap which is a wonderful website that displays a google-esque map showing the geographical location referenced in a particular Bible verse.  All you do is pick a Bible chapter/verse and a map pops up.  It’s as easy as that.  Think of the site as a kind of Bible Atlas linking text with geography.  It’s so cool!

The site is still in Beta testing, so locations are limited, but they are working hard, adding new locations all the time.  They’re trying to work up some funds so they can continue to work on the site, but you should drop by and check it out.  It’s very cool so far!
Oh, and the folks at ESV interviewed one of the developers of Biblemap, Tim Kimberley. While you're at it, check that site out too.

Poetry Editor Brad Fruhauff continues our series on the Craft of Chrisitan Writing.

The World We Write In

My original cunning plan for blogging here was to comb through books on craft and selectively cull them for witty and insightful thoughts.  I quickly decided that I didn’t have the time to properly read any of those books and didn’t want to pretentiously misrepresent myself as some expert on the wide world of poetry-writing guides.  I have other ways of being pretentious.

I began this post at a Borders café in downtown Evanston, IL, the well-to-do hometown of Northwestern University.  While I sat with my gourmet iced tea, blithely typing away on my laptop like the very model of a modern metropolitan, a woman sat down at a table across from me with a huge book on witchcraft.  I thought, two hundred years ago we were burning witches at the stake; now we’re marketing to them.  I don’t think this is a phenomenon limited to “liberal” urban centers—it’s just easier to find here, where there are more people who exist together anonymously.  This is the world we live in, a world in which average people think it not out of the ordinary to “explore” alternative worlds, alternative narratives, including those labeled “metaphysical” and “occult” by Borders, Inc.  And this is the world Christians write poetry in...