On November 14, 2011, Tim Keller spoke at Google on his latest book, The Meaning of Marriage.

OK, I have a few extra copies of the revised version of The Pleasures of God to give away to the next few people who order five or more copies of Thriving at College from one of the links on the right side of this website. Did you know that 70% of high school seniors will pursue college this fall, but that about 30% of them will not advance to their sophomore year?

Why not give out a few copies of Thriving at College to the high school students in your church or school as they get ready to pick a college in the next few weeks, and prepare to go later this year?

“There is no better guide to college than this.”

Alex and Brett Harris, best-selling authors of Do Hard Things

“Most Christian young people go to college without specific goals and are unprepared for the challenges that await them. While some prosper spiritually, most get derailed, and an alarming number abandon their faith. Alex has written an insightful and useful book to help college-bound people know what to expect, how to prepare for it, and what to do to avoid the pitfalls.”

Randy Alcorn, best-selling author of Heaven and If God is Good

“Written by an ‘insider’—a former student, now a professor, this book addresses all the issues a student might face. It will be an excellent gift for all high school seniors.”

Dr. Jerry Bridges, best-selling author of The Pursuit of Holiness

Update: I am all out of extra copies of The Pleasures of God.

Last week I had a great time at the Think Tank run by TruthXChange. What is TruthXChange? This video provides a good intro:

A big thank you to Peter and Rebecca Jones, Mary Eady, and Joshua Gielow.

A three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has just struck down California’s Prop 8—an amendment to the Constitution that defines marriage as one man and one woman.

HT: Stand to Reason

I’ve been enjoying the audio version of Walter Isaacson’s fascinating biography of Steve Jobs, a pioneer who changed the world with a series of blockbuster innovations (though he was also a narcissistic, self-absorbed, arrogant jerk). One of the themes in the book is Jobs’ clashing with other titans in the field, such as Bill Gates. Jobs would later admit that “Microsoft won” the battle to make the graphical user interface a standard part of the personal computing experience.

Today, however, the Apple’s iPhone business alone is bigger than all of Microsoft.

By now you now that the Komen Foundation reversed their wise and appropriate decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood–obviously caving to enormous political and financial pressure.

Ross Douthat, writing for the NY Times, accurately and incisively discusses the heavily biased media coverage leading up to Komen’s reversal:

It’s true that abortion is only one of the services Planned Parenthood provides. (Although mammograms, it should be noted, are not necessarily among them: the group usually provides referrals, but not the mammogram itself, which is one of the reasons Komen’s founder had cited for discontinuing the grant.) But abortion is hardly an itty-bitty and purely tangential aspect of its mission, as many credulous journalists have implied.

Planned Parenthood likes to claim that abortion accounts for just 3 percent of its services, for instance, and this statistic has been endlessly recycled in the press. But the percentage of the group’s clients who received an abortion is probably closer to 1 in 10, and Planned Parenthood’s critics have estimated, plausibly, that between 30 and 40 percent of its health center revenue is from abortion.

By way of comparison, the organization also refers pregnant women for adoption. In 2010, this happened 841 times, against 329,445 abortions.

Read the whole thing.

Relevant Magazine publishes an excerpt from Tim Keller’s outstanding book, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God.

In generations past, there was far less talk about “compatibility” and finding the ideal soul-mate. Today we are looking for someone who accepts us as we are and fulfills our desires, and this creates an unrealistic set of expectations that frustrates both the searchers and the searched for.

Read the whole thing.

HT: Justin Chao

Charles C. Johnson reports:

Claremont McKenna College, a private liberal arts school nestled in the foothills on the eastern outskirts of Los Angeles County, dishonored itself and defrauded the public in a cheap effort to bolster its national rankings in U.S. News and World Report. But if that weren’t bad enough, Claremont’s deception calls into question the very worth of its students, faculty, and graduates.

Richard Vos, Claremont’s dean of admissions for 25 years, resigned in disgrace this week after admitting to systematically manipulating the college’s SAT scores since 2005. Vos evidently altered the mean, median, and range of SAT scores to boost the college’s position on the influential list of college rankings.

The scheme worked. Claremont McKenna cracked U.S. News & World Report’s list of top 10 liberal arts colleges, placing ninth in 2011. But Vos escalated the fraud when he passed along the fake scores to the U.S. Department of Education and Western Association of Schools & Colleges. By so doing, Vos has jeopardized the college’s accreditation and eligibility for federal funds. The college’s bond rating may be downgraded, taking the value of a degree down with it.

Read the whole thing.

For an illuminating, humorous, and yet sobering review of how college ranking lists became so influential, and so easily manipulated, see Andrew Ferguson’s excellent book, Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College. I hope to get around to reviewing it soon.

Danker, of BDAG fame, died today. Prof. Danker is the editor of A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, a magnus opus that virtually every preaching pastor and Bible scholar uses with some regularity.

HT: Rod Decker via Justin Taylor