Round the Sphere Again

The Christmas Goodies Edition

Books
Kingdom People: Ten excellent books to giveaway, but you can’t win if you don’t enter. And hurry! It all ends on Christmas.

Update: Here’s yet another book giveaway—three books, this time—at While We Sojourn.

Monergism.com: Here’s Louis Berkhof’s Summary of Christian Doctrine online.

Music
Justin Taylor: Two free music downloads. I downloaded these and more from Red Mountain Church earlier in December, so I paid for mine. They made a nice addition to my Christmas music collection, and now you can enjoy them for no charge.

A few of you enjoyed listening to the mp3s of my church choir that I posted on Sunday. Here are two more: Sing Gloria and Mary, Did You Know?

Glory 8

For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. (2 Corinthians 4:6 ESV)

(This is, by the way, my very favorite verse.)

Previous post in this series:

• Glory 1
• Glory 2
• Glory 3
• Glory 4
• Glory 5
• Glory 6
• Glory 7

Christmas scripture series from 2007: Light
Christmas scripture series from 2008: Miraculous Births

Shortest Day Complexities

Today is the day of the winter solstice, which means its the day when the maximum height of the sun in the sky is at its lowest point of the year. It also means that today is the shortest day of the year. What it doesn’t mean is that today has the earliest sunset and the latest sunrise.

Nope, our winter sun is a lot more complicated than you might think. If you live on the 40th parallel, your day of earliest sunset was around December 8 and your day of latest sunrise will be around January 5. Since I live much farther north than 40˚, the date of the earliest sunset and the date of the latest sunrise are both closer to December 21, but neither falls on that date. You can read the explanation for this sun phenomenon here.

So it’ll continue to be darker a little later in the morning for me, and for you, too, if you live in the northern hemisphere. Still, I’m really excited about the 7 seconds more daylight I’ll have tomorrow.