Welcome to Blog & Mablog. The name is taken from the prophet Ezekiel (Eze. 38:14-16), who was referring to a bad dude named Gog (from Magog), and if you make a little pun, you have a cultural and theological blog that sweeps down from the north out of Russia in order to invade the land of Israel. But I am supporter of Israel, so I don’t really know what that’s about. Anyway, the fulfillment of that prophecy is about as likely as the other one, and so why let a fun name go to waste?
My name is Douglas Wilson, and I am the chief cook and bottle washer around here. I am happily married to Nancy, 37 years and counting, and I have three kids and kids-in-law who all make me the right kind of proud, and I also have teeming hordes of grandchildren who come over to our house pretty regularly in order to terryhoot. By “teeming hordes” I mean sixteen.
Here we are, happy as anything. As Nancy put it the other day, it has been a “good run.”
Let me introduce you to the basic functional layout of the blog and the social media stuff here, and then I will give you a bit more information about myself. You can follow me on Twitter on this wise, as King James might have said — @douglaswils. My Facebook page is one of those public ones, which you can find here.
If you want to find your way to a list of books I have written, edited, and/or contributed to, they can be found here. Another way to get there is by clicking “Books” on the top menu bar.
The point of this blog is pretty broad — “All of Christ for all of life.” I want to advance what you might call a Chestertonian Calvinism, and to bring that attitude to bear on education, sex and culture, theology, politics, book reviews, postmodernism, expository studies, along with other random tidbits that come into my head. My perspective is usually not hard to discern. In theology I am an evangelical, postmill, Calvinist, Reformed, and Presbyterian, pretty much in that order. In politics, I am slightly to the right of Jeb Stuart. In my cultural sympathies, if we were comparing the blight of postmodernism to a vast but shallow goo pond, I would observe that I have spent many years on these stilts and have barely gotten any of it on me.
If you are new to this blog, the best way to get acquainted with what Deuteronomy would describe as my “going out and coming in” is by checking out some of the more widely read posts. If you read these five posts, you will have a pretty good idea whether you will want to hang out in these parts.
The first, under the category of Goo-Mongers, is Ten Theses on Postmodernism. The second representative, under Theology, was called A Polecat in a Hollow Tree, in which I mix it up with N.T. Wright and R.C. Sproul. Third, under Culture and Politics, I had the temerity to write this little bit, called A Jungle Full of Monkeys. For a fourth instance, under Sex and Culture, I wrote Dealing With Nuisance Lust. And last, I write frequently on economics, and under the heading of Money, Love, Desire, I wrote this piece on unions called Without the Boats and Eye Patches. There is a lot more than that in the archives, but this sampling should give you at least some idea of the range.
I post pretty regularly. Most days there will be from three to five posts. Because of my schedule, Thursdays and Fridays are usually the lightest, with about one post on average.