Melissa WIley: Fresh Starts and Her Rule of Six. A good beginning to the new year.

Randy Alcorn on Joel Stein, Starbucks, and Heaven. I’m going to be reading Mr. Alcorn’s book Heaven in January, and I’ll let you know what I think. For now, I think his response to Mr. Stein was gracious and Christ-like.

Joe McKeever: My Dad Keeps Sending Me These Notes. Mr. McKeever gave me an idea, and I’m taking notes in my Bible and planning to give it to one of the urchins someday.

Mental Multivitamin: In a ragged pocket . . . Ms. Multivitamin has such a gift for appreciating the finer things in life, like poetry.

S.M. Hutchens at Mere Comments: Not Your Father’s Christianity—Or Anybody Else’s. Hutchens posits that “loss of faith” has more to do with license to sin than with intellectual doubts. I rather think he’s right.

Alan Noble on Aslan, the Grandfatherly God at Christ and Pop Culture. Have the Narnia movies removed all the “danger” from Lewis’s picture of God?

Ken Brown on Selfishness and Sacrifice in LOST.

Nine kids, 12 years and 30,000 diapers later and all I am sure of is how much I don’t know about parenting at Urban Servant. Humility is something we could all use a good dose of.

Examining the unborn at Bookworm Room. A thoughtful examination of abortion ethics from a Jewish perspective.

Jennifer at Conversion Diary on How I Became Pro-Life. Self-explanatory title, but it’s thoughtful and engaging as I’ve come to expect from this formerly atheist blogger.

The Headmistress, in a post from 2005 on Being Poor and welcoming a child. I linked in 2008 because it’s a good story for any year.

Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights? by Orson Scott Card. Not a blog post, but a newspaper column by the noted author of novels and science fiction who is a Democrat, by the way, this scathing indictment of the irresponsibility and the duplicity of the press and of the Democrat party in regards to the financial crisis is a must-read, even though they got away with it.