Belize Bux or Bust!
A couple of us here at swordandspirit are planning on going down to Belize in November. Why, you may ask? To teach basic apologetics to some of the local people at Machaca Discipleship Training Camp in southern Belize. If you have been blessed by anything here or feel that maybe our brand of apologetics might be a blessing to these people, would you consider helping us out financially? It will be a little over $1000/person and at least two of us are going. And our day jobs are not exactly what one might call "CEO salary" status. ;) IF you can, please go to our Donation Station where you can donate via check or PayPal. THANKS!!!

Kickin' some new shirt!
This one is a Bruce Cockburn lyric we have been wanting to do for a millenium. And now... well... we have. It is part of our tiny attempt as followers of the Man from Galilee to be active participants in this mess we call Planet Earth. Active, rather than the passive non-agressors we can be. Take it at whatever level you want: spiritual, relational, intellectual, moral, political, any -al you want. Just do something to make a change and make sure you include Jesus as part of your message! (Derp!). In the next day we'll update the shirt page to include details, but you can have one for a donation. We ain't selling this thing. We're giving it away as a thank-you for people who help the ministry.

Ka-Boom!
Well, finally! This talk was a long time coming. One of the most misunderstood phenomena in the history of science and faith, to wit, the creation of the universe, is an apologetics tool like few others. Yet for some bizarre and illogical reasons many Christians will not touch it. Here we talk about what the Bible says about the beginning, what nature says about, and see that they are one and the same. And - added bonus! - we shoot down some tired myths we Christians carry around like so much stinky B.O.
Go here to get it!

A-ten-hut, Bible Boot Campers!
For those of you who were brave enough to attend our mini series on apologetics for Student Venture's Bible Boot Camp in Temecula, CA, here are the notes you were trying to desperately scribble down as our train kept chugging down the tracks. They are the mere pdf files, but dang! they're so pretty. You will just have to imagine our handsome mugs lecturing next to them. :)
Go here to get them!

The Former Forum.
Our forum sorta looks like this forum in Rome. Old, smelly, infiltrated by unwanted tourists, kinda discolored, no longer the glorious meeting place it was in days of olde, when free speech would walk the pavement, when there was no fear of naughty people breaking and entering only to leave turds all over the sidewalk faster than we could clean them away.
YEA VERILY! We have a new forum for you to come and spill your love guts all over, for you to hear the beautiful truth as we define it, all without being afraid of the turd droppers of the past. It is called The Point. No fancy artwork up yet, but you can go to The Point here and partake of our brainwash.... errr... our forum of free thought. ;)

No more excuses!!!
We have a whole new truckload of ministries involved in serving and community service and getting kids out of human trafficking and slavery and prostitution and inner-city problems and homelessness and drugs and helping in foreign countries and surfing for the Lord (!) and and and... C'mon! There are no excuses any more. Get off thy backside and - in the name of God - GO HELP!!! (love you!)
Go to Servant Evangelism and sign up with someone!!!

You can help now. So... do.
Well, we're trying to do something, for free, for you, and for our brothers and sisters who are having the he** beat out of them throughout the world by some fun-loving religious fanatics and their ilk. We are supplying you with a couple of things you can share with your group.
One is this 4x6 card which we will make every other month. It has a real life prisoner in a real country which is really mistreating him/her. Here is the front. Here is the back. We can send you the Illustrator file now. (At the moment we don't have the means to send you the cards.) But find a print shop and they can print the high resolution files.
We also have powerpoint presentations that you can show in your church. Of what? you may ask.
Of what's going on in the less comfortable parts of the globe where Christians are really being persecuted and thrown in prison and beat up and deprived of anything resembling human rights. This is a way to educate your congregation before the service starts. The info comes to us via Voices of the Martyrs and Persecution.com and PrisonerAlert.com and Compass Direct. Thanks to their frontline fighting, you can find out whom to pray for around this dark globe of ours.
Get the THE LATEST UPDATE free here.

Paper your walls.
You need a fine wallpaper or background for your Mac or PC, don't you? Say yes! Well, we have a couple of them for you. One is our Gaelic version of Your Love is teaching me how to kneel. The other is Bob the Knight, our mascot, so to speak. They come in all sizes for all displays. They are hi-res, they are purty, they are yours. Go here. :)

Our hero.
Alright, we know you may not like this guy here for any of a number of reasons, like his bug glasses, or his rock 'n roll music, or his smoking, or his onstage antics, or his occasional sailor mouth, or - worst of all - that he is Irish. But you cannot ignore that he is one of the few celebrities in the world who is actually doing something constructive with that celebrtity status - like trying to end extreme poverty and AIDS. Wow, it's almost Jesus-like, this love for the poor and outcast.
Just recently Bono (the guy we're talking about, a confessed Christian) received the NAACP's Chairman Award. You can see it here. The first five minutes are typical award bantor - blah blah blah - but by the end of Bono's sermonette, if you aren't welling up with tears and motivated to be more like Jesus, we diagnose you with acardia - you have no heart. Give it a look and be inspired!!!

Do you know Him?
We are embarrassed to admit that we have never heard of S. M. Lockridge before. Shame on us. And to make matters worse he was from San Diego!!! But what a preacher he must have been to deliver a sermon like "That's My King." Here is a small video which puts just 4 minutes of the slightly longer sermon to pictures. Wake up every morning with this and if you aren't moved, you're dead.

Bail ó Dhia ort. You like foreign languages, huh? Try this on. We wanted to make a shirt that said Your love is teaching me how to kneel, from U2's Vertigo, since that's pretty much what we want to be about. But we thought we'd do it in Gaelic in honor of U2's Irish heritage and c'mon! where are you ever gonna see an Irish shirt outside of Ireland or an Irish festival?
Our friends at The Daltai Discussion forum couldn't EXACTLY match the phrase without massacring the language so they took some poetic liberty and ba-da-bing! we get this expression of celtic beauty. It really means both (a) that your example teaches me humility, and (b) that I am humbled by the generosity of your love". Cool, eh? that double-meaning thing? Go here and see it in more detail and order one. Come on, you know we practically give our stuff away. [by the way, it's pronounced iss oola-di may duh ghrah, plus or minus] Better, it sounds like this. Thanks Aonghus!
Here is the new art for the shirt. (here).