• On the abandoned legacy of Baron Pierre de Coubertin – When the Olympics gave out medals for art
• Ai Wei Wei on his favorite artists, living in New York, and why the government is afraid of him
• Gordon Campbell on How the Republicans are using voter ID laws to steal the Presidency, on why Hating Australians is Boring and on the NZ government’s partial asset sales policy.
• More on asset sales: James Meek looks at how we happened to sell off our electricity
• Liu Bolin and the art of disappearing (plus a video on how he does it)
• Ben Myers’ letter to George Herbert
• Julie Bosman on E-Book Pricing
• Travis McMaken shares some more from Calvin and from Bruce Gordon on Calvin
• Adam Kotsko on how to read Žižek
• Why have we fallen out of love with organic food?
• Charles Simic on poets and money
• Quite a lineup – John Milbank, Benjamin Myers, Susan Neiman, Kevin Hart, Richard Kearney, Marilyn McCord Adams and Stanley Hauerwas – discuss God, good and evil
• Aung San Suu Kyi on the power of Buddhism
• Herman Melville – from Pittsfield to Liverpool to Jerusalem
• Rowan Williams and Francis Spufford on being a Christian
• Jesus vs. Mao? An interview with Yuan Zhiming
• Michel Foucault: lectures on Truth, Discourse & The Self
• Mary Beard on exams
• Jeff Johnson alerts us to what sounds like a fascinating book on the American Buffalo
• David Bentley Hart’s lecture on ‘Tradition v. Innovation’
• Kim Fabricius is at it again with another set of doodlings
• Dave Andrews’ Ramadan Diary

Finally, I want to give a big shout out to a friend, minister and musician named Malcolm Gordon. Malcs has been busy writing material for his latest album. (You can check out some of his earlier work here and here. You can even get some of it for free here.) The songs have grown out of his preaching ministry at St Paul’s Presbyterian in Katikati, in the Bay of Plenty. For a while now, Malcs has known that most of our theology (good and bad) is sung. He writes: ‘That’s how we retain and take ownership of anything, we hum it, we whistle it – we take the word made flesh and make it a song’.

Malcolm has recently stepped out of parish ministry to make more space for this wildly unpredictable gift of music, and he’s about to head into the studio to record an album that has the tentative working title, ‘Into the deep.’ You can listen to the title track itself here:

About this song, Malcolm writes: ‘This song seems to capture the incredible feeling of being out of our depth as we seek to follow the call of God into something that doesn’t even seem to exist yet. Still God’s word is a creative word, making so as it calls us to – well here’s hoping!’

Malcolm is currently and shamelessly trying to raise funds to complete the album through the mixing and mastering stage. So if you like what you hear, and want the church to hear more of it, and sing more of it, then please consider helping him out through this campaign on Social backing.