There are two basic ways for evangelical Christians to care about the arts. One is the Kuyperian Reformed route, and the other is the way of bohemian pose-striking. One of the most heartening aspects of the “young, restless, and Reformed” development is the possibility of a real aesthetic reformation. Perhaps I should explain myself. Scripture …
Grace for When Your Christian Life Stinks
The Leaven of Malice
“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11) The Basket Case Chronicles #46 “Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (1 Cor. 5:8). Christians celebrate Passover. In this passage, they do …
The PHI Index
“The ancient Hebrews had Ten Commandments, and one slim volume of commentary on those commandments. Go to the nearest law library and ask to see the regulations that you, enlightened modern man, live under. They will show you shelf after shelf of big fat books, and the incoming regulations will, on a daily basis, far …
Bounded Service
[Overworked pastors] “respond to every conceivable need, and feel guilty if they are not readily available to anybody at any time. One cannot fault their dedication, their enthusiasm or their commitment. And indeed the pastor is called to serve people, as Christ himself did. But they have forgotten that there were times when Jesus himself …
Where the Simplifying is Wanted
“Hitchens assumes that the elimination of God from the creation of all things is a simplifying move. It may have simplified Hitchens’ personal life, but it most emphatically does not simplify our explanations of how spiders figured out web engineering” (God Is, p. 43)
Grab n’ Go Study
“I have come to believe in the cumulative value of shorter periods of study” (Stott, Between Two Worlds, p. 202).
Five Degrees to the Left is not Upside Down
“Those of low estate are but a breath; those of high estate are a delusion; in the balances they go up; they are together lighter than a breath” (Ps. 62:9, ESV). The work of missions must be built on something more substantial than the need. The need, as Oswald Chambers put it somewhere, is not …
Too Easily Gobsmacked
“And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also” (Gen. 1:16). Too many of us take this as saying nothing more than that God put a big shiny thing up in the sky for the daytime, and a …
If You’ve Lost Kinky . . .
Leave out the media’s need to stretch out excitement (and therefore viewer engagement) to the maximum point of endurance. Leave out their ratings-driven need to keep the presidential contest as much of “a game” as they can for as long as they can. For example, if one Super Bowl team is 58 points ahead in …