• What is the apparent moral stance of the work in question?
• What is the apparent worldview of the author?
• What can be accepted - i.e., what is true?
• What must be rejected as untrue?
• Should one retreat from or participate in culture, and to what extent?

The French physicist André Marie Ampère (1775-1836) was the founder of electrodynamics, and because of his analysis of the magnetic effects of current-carrying wires has the unit of electrical current (the "ampere") named after him.

“The worth and excellency of a soul is to be measured by the object of its love. He who loveth mean and sordid things doth thereby become base and vile, but a noble and well-placed affection doth advance and improve the spirit into a conformity with the perfections which it loves.” - Henry Scougal in The Life of God in the Soul of Man

The Christian is the real radical of our generation, for he stands against the monolithic, modern concept of truth as relative - we believe in the unity of truth. But too often, instead of being radical, standing against the shifting sands of relativism, he subsides into merely maintaining the status quo. If it is true that evil is evil, that God hates it to the point of the cross and that there is a moral law fixed in what God is in Himself, then Christians should be the first into the field against what is wrong - including man's inhumanity to man.  - Francis Schaeffer, The God Who is There, 107

A striking story about the growth of persecution against people of Conscience in China:

China's 'Conscience' Missing in Action: Top Christian lawyer Gao Zhisheng vanishes as government stifles dissent

Eight years ago, China's Ministry of Justice named Gao Zhisheng, a brilliant, mostly self-educated man, one of the country's top ten lawyers. In 2008, Gao received a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize for his human-rights advocacy work. Then, less than a year later, Gao disappeared when security police spirited him away.

Often called "the conscience of China," the 45-year-old Christian gained worldwide acclaim for his defense of workers, political activists, and religious groups. Todd Nettleton, spokesman for Voice of the Martyrs, said Gao had the "audacity" to tell the world how poorly China treats its people. In 2005, Gao criticized China's torture of adherents of Falun Gong, a traditional Chinese religion, and his comments triggered a brutal response. For over seven weeks in 2007, police tortured Gao with cigarette burns and electric batons, threatening to kill him.

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Lot's of chatter about Tim Keller's new book Counterfeit Gods.  I am getting my copy soon ... very soon.

Justin Taylor pointed this out in his blog: Idols of the Heart and Vanity Fair

“It were better for him [the preacher] to break his neck going up into the pulpit, if he does not take pains to be the first to follow God.” - John Calvin

O if you have the hearts of Christians ... let them yearn toward your poor ignorant ungodly neighbors! Alas, there is but a step betwixt them and death and hell; many hundred diseases are waiting ready to seize them, and if they die unregenerate, they are lost forever. - Have you hearts of rock, that cannot pity men in such a case as this? If you believe not the Word of God [about the danger of sin], how are you Christians yourselves? If you do but believe it, why do you not bestir yourself to help others? Do you not care who is damned, [so long as you are] saved? If so, you have as much cause to pity your own selves; for it is a frame of spirit inconsistent with grace. [...] 

Hath God had so much mercy on you, and will you have no mercy on your poor neighbor? You need not go far to find objects for your pity: look ... into the streets, or into the next house to you, and you will probably find some. Have you not a neighbor that sets his heart below, and neglecteth eternity ? What blessed place do you live in, where there is none such ? If there he not some of them in thine own family, it is well; and yet art thou silent ? Dost thou live close by them, or meet them in the streets, or labor with them, or travel with them, or sit still and talk with them, and say nothing to them of their souls, or the life to come? If their houses were on fire, thou wouldst run and help them ; and wilt thou not help them when their souls are almost at the fire of hell? If thou knowest but a remedy for their diseases thou wouldst tell it them, or else thou wouldst judge thyself guilty of their death.

(Richard Baxter, The Saints Everlasting Rest, page 179)

• There are 27 million slaves in the world today, more than the number of slaves over 400 years of the African Slave Trade. 
• In colonial America a slave cost the equivalent of $40,000 in today's dollars.  Today, as in the national geographic article posted below, a slave costs $1,500 or even less!  The sad proliferation of this practice smear the incalculable value of people made in God's image.  You can't put any price on life.