I recently discovered LibraryThing via David Weinberger's blog. What a great idea! It's like del.icio.us for personal libraries instead of web sites: the basic Web 2.0 principle in effect is that if you're interested in the same things (books, sites, you name it) as me, i might learn some new things from what else you're interested in. Even better, you get the mix of the personal perspective (via folksonomic tags) with the more structured and authoritative Library of Congress subject headings.

Here's the page on the Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, which includes a number of other book recommendations that seem right on.

Of course, it takes some work to enter your book information and you can only enter so many without a membership fee. That's initially a counter-intuitive notion until you recognize the benefit you get is proportional to the amount you (along with everybody else) give -- see the previous post on the morality of generosity.

Catching up on some posts ... Tim O'Reilly has a great post on Web 2.0 and an interchange with Doc Searls, co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto. Searls sees Web 2.0 as fundamentally deriving from morality as generosity. If you read down to the bottom, Searls has a link to an earlier post about how he learned this lesson from a Nigerian Christian minister named Sayo Ajiboye.

I love the idea that we're finally discovering (in the networked systems domain) the beneficial outcome in our own lives of following a fundamental principle: God gives generously to all (James 1:5), so we should too.