Syzygy

I’ve been tagged for one o’ them crazy memes. This one involves:

1. Grabbing the nearest book.
2. Turning to page 123.
3. Quoting the fifth sentence on the page.

I’m sitting in the front room near a bookshelf full of books. Strictly speaking, there are four books that are nearly equidistant from me, so I’m going to quote the requested passage from all four of them.

From Matthew Henry’s Commentary on the Whole Bible:

Thus the correspondence was to be first settled by a sensible appearance of the divine glory, which was afterwards to be carried on more silently by the ministry of Moses.

From the Reformed Expository Commentary on Galatians by Philip Graham Ryken:

Even though he did not use these precise words, Paul obviously believed that the Bible is infallible and inerrant from beginning to end.

From Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology:

Because there is some common knowledge of right and wrong, Christians can often find much consensus with non-Christians in matters of civil law, community standards, basic ethics for business and professional activity, and acceptable patterns of conduct in ordinary life.

And the wildcard in the bunch, from Richard Lyman Bushman’s Rough Stone Rolling:

The revelation on the millennial gathering brought all the routine activities of everyday life into question.

I’ve been using LibraryThing to catalog my books since September 2005. All Things Considered on NPR recently featured LibraryThing in a story called “Web Sites Let Bibliophiles Share Books Virtually” (listen).

I especially love the intro to this story:

You know that you’re a bibliophile if you check out peoples’ bookshelves when you visit their homes, if you never pass a used bookstore without going in, or if you have a giant wishlist on Amazon.com.

That fits me to a tee. If it fits you, you owe it to yourself to check out LibraryThing!

(hat tip: The LibraryThing Blog)