[UPDATE, 1/14/12: Jeff Bethke has responded to DeYoung’s critique with great humility and teachableness. Kevin DeYoung shares a bit about their e-mail correspondence, and it is really encouraging. Read it here.]

This is a fascinating little tidbit from Christianity Today‘s interview with Paul Simon. [Paul Simon] decided he wanted to meet Stott, and a friend helped connect them. Simon called the theologian and offered to take him out for dinner. He said Stott told him he didn’t go out much anymore and instead invited the musician to his flat for tea and biscuits. “I’d say we spent two or three hours there,” Simon recalled. “I talked about everything that was on my mind about things that seemed illogical, and he talked about why he had come to his conclusions.” Simon was very impressed by Stott. “I liked him immensely,” he told…

CNN did an interview with Mark Driscoll about his new book Real Marriage. In the course of the interview, they asked him if he would like to respond to some of the negative reviews. Here’s the exchange: When asked to respond to his critics, Driscoll said he hadn’t read any of the reviews but that “sometimes reviewers will reveal more of their own struggles than actual problems with the book.” “I am not backing down from it. I am going to stick to my guns on it,” Mark Driscoll said. “This is not just stuff that I have pulled out of my mind. These are issues I have dealt with…

Tim Challies tells the story of standing in the back of a church several years ago at an unbelieving friend’s funeral. It is a gut-wrenching moment, and the feeling he describes is something we should all feel more often than we do. He writes: I stood back there silent and ashamed and knowing that death is final and yet not final. I knew what everyone else there denied—that Mike was dead but alive. His body had died and was already returning to the dust. But his soul was alive and well. Or not well. Probably not well. As far as I know, Mike never turned to the Lord. He never…