The Joshua Tree 2007

In 2007 The Joshua Tree, remastered, arrives in four different formats including a bonus audio CD of b-sides and rarities, a live concert DVD shot in Paris in 1987 and booklets featuring liner notes from the band and unseen photography from Anton Corbijn. Here’s all the detail.

CD format:

The CD format features remastered audio, liner notes by Bill Flanagan (author of “U2 At The End Of The World”) and previously unseen Anton Corbijn photos.

Tracklist for The Joshua Tree:
Where The Streets Have No Name / I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For / With Or Without You / Bullet The Blue Sky / Running To Stand Still / Red Hill Mining Town / In God’s Country / Trip Through Your Wires / One Tree Hill / Exit / Mothers Of The Disappeared

Deluxe format:

The deluxe package comprises The Joshua Tree CD (as above), and a Bonus Audio CD. The bonus audio CD features b-sides and rarities from the Joshua Tree sessions. The 2-CD format also includes a 36 page bound book, featuring liner notes by Bill Flanagan with a special essay by The Edge, previously unseen photos by Anton Corbijn and handwritten lyrics by Bono.

Tracklist for the Bonus Audio CD:
Luminous Times (Hold On To Love) / Walk To The Water / Spanish Eyes / Deep In The Heart / Silver And Gold / Sweetest Thing / Race Against Time / Where The Streets Have No Name (Single edit) / Silver And Gold (Sun City) / Beautiful Ghost/Introduction to Songs of Experience / Wave Of Sorrow (Birdland) / Desert Of Our Love / Rise Up / Drunk Chicken/America

Box Set format:

The 3 disc box-set format contains The Joshua Tree CD, the bonus audio CD (both as above), and a Bonus DVD. This package also includes a 56 page hardback embossed book, featuring previously unseen Anton Corbijn photos, handwritten lyrics by Bono and liner notes by Bill Flanagan, Bono, Adam Clayton, Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois, Anton Corbijn, Steve Averill, David Batstone, René Castro and a special essay by The Edge.

Content for the Bonus DVD:
U2 Live from Paris - filmed at the Hippodrome de Vincennes in Paris, on July 41987, on the European leg of The Joshua Tree tour. The tracklist is as follows: I Will Follow / Trip Through Your Wires / I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For / MLK / The Unforgettable Fire / Sunday Bloody Sunday / Exit / In God’s Country / Electric Co. / Bad / October / New Year’s Day / Pride (In The Name Of Love) / Bullet The Blue Sky / Running To Stand Still / With Or Without You / Party Girl / 40
Outside It’s America – a 40 minute documentary
With Or Without You – music video, alternative version
Red Hill Mining Town – music video directed by Neil Jordan.

Double vinyl album:

The double vinyl format of The Joshua Tree includes a 16 page booklet containing lyrics and liner notes by Bill Flanagan, as well as previously unseen Anton Corbijn photos.

Tracklist for The Joshua Tree double vinyl album: SIDE ONE Where The Streets Have No Name / I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For / With Or Without You SIDE TWO Bullet The Blue Sky / Running To Stand Still SIDE THREE Red Hill Mining Town / In God’s Country / Trip Through Your Wires SIDE FOUR One Tree Hill / Exit / Mothers Of The Disappeared

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Christianity’s Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution – A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First

An Interview with Dr. Alistair McGrath

Listen here

The right for believers to interpret Scripture lies at the core of Protestantism. Dr. McGrath writes his latest book Christianity’s Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution – A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First to help the church today remember the roots and adaptability of Protestantism. With a balance of criticism and encouragement, McGrath clearly presents the development of Protestantism over the past 500 years. He concludes with great insight on the tremendous upside of Protestantism in that it continues to be close to the culture yet faithful to preaching the gospel. We are very thankful for his flexibility to do this interview over the phone with us (especially with the time difference involved!).

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Hilliam Clinton: Remember "Clintonesque"? So does Hillary.

In the 1990s, "Clintonesque" became a by-word for political double-speak. We even became, briefly, a nation of deconstructionists when President Bill Clinton mused on the meaning of "is."

Such existential questions seemed to be in the past. But with another Clinton running as if she's all but a sure thing for the White House, Clintonesque is once again becoming a politically relevant adjective. In Tuesday night's Democratic Presidential debate, the moderators and Hillary Clinton's fellow panelists took pains to pin her down on one question after another, without notable success. The junior Senator from New York seems increasingly to have adopted her husband's political methods, minus the savoir-faire. The result is that it's impossible to know what she believes about anything.

...The political strategy is clear enough. Mrs. Clinton wants to roll to her party's nomination on a tide of "inevitability" while disguising her real agenda as much as possible. But Democratic voters ought to consider whether they want to put all their hopes for retaking the White House on Mrs. Clinton's ability to obfuscate like her husband without his preternatural talent for it. Aside from lacking her husband's political gifts, Hillary's challenge is that we've all seen this movie before. And performances like Tuesday's might be enough to convince voters to opt for a candidate who is his own man.

Despite the Gloom, More Bush Boom

...a remarkable thing just happened: Real gross domestic product, the best summary report of the American economy, came in at a breathtaking 3.9 percent annual rate for the third quarter. In fact, following the 3.8 percent growth rate for the second quarter, the U.S. economy has posted its strongest quarterly growth in four years. The economy actually appears to be speeding up, following the relatively sluggish performance of the prior 18 months.

the inflation rate is actually slowing down. The consumer spending deflator is reading 2.1 percent for the past year, compared to over 3 percent six quarters ago. The core inflation rate is down to 1.9 percent, below the Fed’s 2 percent target.

Even employment is holding its own. According to Automatic Data Processing’s private employment survey, which showed its strongest gain in four months, October looks like it will produce about 125,000 new jobs.

Meanwhile, rising exports of American goods and services are booming to such an extent that the deep housing recession is being cancelled out. And while many continue to predict a consumer collapse because of falling home prices and tighter credit, after-tax inflation-adjusted income is 4.1 percent ahead of last year, for a $344 billion gain, while the purchase cost of energy prices are flat. The little noticed factoid is that consumer energy use per unit of GDP has actually fallen by more than 50 percent in recent decades.

The true message of the strong economy is that we’re virtually guaranteed of a Goldilocks soft landing or better — and certainly not a recession.

It’s interesting that while the Bush tax cuts of 2003 continue to encourage investment and entrepreneurship, expanding national income and higher tax collections have brought the big bad budget deficit down to $160 billion, or roughly 1 percent of GDP. Using something called the primary deficit — which extracts net interest on the debt and can be used to measure fiscal stimulus on the economy — we actually have a 70 billion surplus.

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Valuing Biblical Manhood, by John Piper

Last week at a lunch for pastors, I gave a message you can listen to called "Some Sweet Blessings of Masculine Christianity." I drew out eleven benefits of valuing biblical manhood. Here is my outline:

By “masculine Christianity,” I mean (though words are inadequate):

The theology and the church and the mission are marked by over-arching male leadership and an ethos of tender-hearted strength and contrite courage and risk-taking decisiveness and readiness to sacrifice to protect and provide for the community—the feel of a great, majestic God making the men lovingly strong and the women intelligently secure.

In this ethos…

1. Men are freed to have feminine traits without being effeminate and women are freed to have masculine traits without being tomboys. (The most admirable women have masculine traits and the most admirable men have feminine traits: Lopsided masculinity and femininity are not as admirable.)

2. Men are more properly attracted to the Christian life when it does not appear that he must become effeminate to be a Christian. (Dominance of female leadership undermines the proper sense of a man’s call to be a leader, protector, and provider.)

3. Women are more properly drawn to a Christian life that highlights the proper place of humble, strong, spiritual men in leadership. This more properly feels freeing and safe. It feels like a place where the men in her life might learn to take initiative without being domineering.

4. We are freed to celebrate strong, courageous women of God who love the biblical vision complementarity, without and sense of compromise. The men are so clearly strong and secure in their leadership that they are not threatened by women who are spiritually mature and effective in ministry.

5. Men are awakened to their responsibilities at home to lead the family and protect the family and provide for the family. A clear definition of manhood helps a man take responsibility.

6. Youth leaders and parents will catch a clearer definition of how to answer the question of a boy: “Daddy, what does it mean to grow up and be a man and not a woman?” And a clearer definition of how to answer the question of a girl: “Mommy, what does it mean to grow up and be a woman and not a man?”

7. The meaning of masculinity and femininity in singleness will be clearer and a lifetime of singleness without sexual intercourse will be more understandable and livable. (The definitions of masculinity and femininity in What’s the Difference? are not marriage-specific.)

8. The corporate worship teams are not dominated by women and the songs chosen are not dominated by a one-sided feel of intimacy or majesty. The presence of masculine men and strong theology and music give the corporate worship a feel of strength that helps men discover and express the fullness of the emotions toward God that God calls for.

9. The God of the Bible will be more fully portrayed and known than where the tone is more feminine. The God of the Bible is overwhelmingly powerful and authoritative and often violent. He is Lord and King and Master and Sovereign and Father and Ruler. His tenderness and gentleness and patience shine in their beauty because of appearing in this dominant light. Women need an ethos of this kind so that they can relax and be more of their nurturing selves without fearing that they must work to create the ethos of God’s grandeur lest it be lost because the men are not speaking it and modeling it.

10. Preaching is more readily prized. Preaching is “expository exultation”—a forceful acclamation of the greatness of God and a passionate appeal for full-blooded response to him. The fear of strong preaching is part of the effeminizing of the church, and the full range of the way God is and appears on the Bible is not known where preaching is simply casual and conversational.

11. A wartime mindset and a wartime lifestyle will feel more natural. And that is what the world needs from us—a readiness to lay our lives down for a great and global cause making all the sacrifices necessary to push the word of Christ into the most inhospitable places.

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Tim Keller wrote a book

Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York, writes to his church that, yes, he has written a book that will be available in February. It is called The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. The link above explains the need for the book.

You can pre-order it.

If you are unfamiliar with Keller, you can check out the message he gave at John Piper's 2006 national conference.