Christian Carnival CCLXXXIV

Welcome to the 284th Christian Carnival. The Christian Carnival is a weekly collection of some of the best posts of the Christian blogosphere. It's open to Christians of Protestant, Orthodox, and Roman Catholic convictions. One of the goals of this carnival is to offer our readers to a broad range of Christian thought. For more on Christian Carnival participation, see here.

I'm not including every post that was submitted. To qualify for inclusion in the Christian Carnival, submissions must have been posted to your blog within the past week. Hosts often allow a little wiggle-room for submissions that are close enough (I allowed several exceptions), but this week's submissions included posts as old as January and February. It also has to be Christian-related. Again, there's a lot of wiggle-room as to what counts as Christian for the purposes of the Christian Carnival, but a list of blogs having to do with Zen or a list of iPhone apps isn't Christian by any reasonable standard. This is also a blog carnival, which means submissions need to be blog posts. If it's not from a blog, this isn't the forum for it, especially if it's from a spam link-farm or some other advertising outlet. We also allow just one post per author per blog. One author submitted give posts this week (only two were written this past week, so it wasn't as hard to choose which to include: I just went with the one that was submitted first). Hosts don't often reiterate these criteria, so I thought it was worth drawing some attention to them.

I was expecting to have more time to put this together, but I took a lot longer to finish my grading for my summer courses than I'd expected, and my family got back yesterday from a long trip to New York City to see family, and the boys started summer school this morning, which involves a lot more than just putting them on the bus when special education services are at issue and they've got professionals working with them who don't know them at all. So I'm a bit late in putting this together, and I'm pretty much giving you the links, titles, and blog titles for submissions unless the submission included a description. But we've still got a list of the self-evaluated best posts of the week from the Christian blogs whose authors went out of their way to submit something. Enough business . . . on to the Carnival! Posts are in the order I received them.