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 a 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, coming up on 50 years, 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 eighteen. And now, just added, our first two great grandchildren, which means that the definition of terryhoot has drifted somewhat over the years. We are not just okay-grandparents. We are great grandparents.
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.” In order to make that happen, we need “theology that bites back.” 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 my 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 or not you will want to hang out in these parts.
The first is Ten Theses on Postmodernism. The second representative, under the category Theology & Calvinism, was called A Polecat in a Hollow Tree, in which I mix it up with N.T. Wright and R.C. Sproul. Third, with a tag Culture and Politics, I had the temerity to write this little bit, called A Jungle Full of Monkeys. For a fourth instance, under the tag Sex and Culture, I wrote Dealing With Nuisance Lust. And last, I write frequently on economics, and under the category 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 of my substantive posts drop on Monday and Wednesday mornings. Other posts are sprinkled around—random quotes from things I have written previously, sermon outlines, wedding homilies, and so on.
One last item of business can be filed in the full disclosure department, just so that you can’t say I didn’t tell you. I am now a partial stakeholder in Canon Press, which means that you should know that any promotion of Canon books, products and services on my part is not exactly disinterested. This doesn’t really change anything much, both because my motives are pure, and because I would be promoting all their stuff anyway. But we did think you ought to know—especially those of you who might be worried about it.