“Your parishioners listen to other preachers on the radio, watch them on TV and on the Web, and download pdcasts to their iPods. Like it or not, you are not the best preacher that your people have listened to this week. Your congregation has compared and contrasted you with the best-known preachers of the day …
The Problem With Their Syncretisms
Suppose a measure is before your state legislature to build a bridge over a river in your town. There are ardent Christians in your town who think this is a good idea, and ardent Christians who want to leave well enough alone. Surrounding these pro and con Christians are the unbelievers who also, not surprisingly, …
Paul on Divorce and Remarriage
“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11) The Basket Case Chronicles #74 “Art thou bound unto a wife? seek not to be loosed. Art thou loosed from a wife? seek not a wife. But and if thou marry, thou hast not sinned; and if a virgin marry, she hath not …
Subset Fundamentalism
“There is a truncated kind of fundamentalism that lives in a world mysteriously shaped and governed by modernity, but is in possession of a perfect book, a book in which they find secret coded messages about another world somewhere else, governed on other principles entirely” (From With Calvin in the Theater of God, p. 87).
Book of the Month/May 2012
Below is the cover of my selection for the book of the month in May 2012, and just following that image is the book trailer. Full disclosure: the author, Mitch Stokes, is a friend of mine, which some might assume could skew this review. But no, I write objectively, with steely-eyed resolve. And also, on …
The Downward Spiral
“The university is a Christian idea — where does the uni come from? Christ is the arche, the integration point of all things (Col. 1:17-18). But we, in our disobedience, have become fragmented thinkers. The universe is a Christian concept, as is the university. But knowledge is now fragmented, like Humpty Dumpty, and our students …
Grace At Our Level
“Any fool can preach like a genius, but it takes a genius to preach simply” (David Murray, How Sermons Work, p. 146)
Our Doctrinal and Liturgical Bramble Bushes
I am fond of saying that grace has a backbone, but I think it is time to explain what I mean by that. The context of these remarks is the general and current ongoing discussion about the worrisome trajectories of all those incipient legalists and antinomians out there. The incipient legalists are the ones the …
The First Collision Outtake
When the documentary Collision was filmed, the director Darren Doane had many hours of footage which went into the making of the ninety minute film. That meant a lot of material on the cutting room floor. Here is the first in a series of outtakes, released publicly here for the first time.
Son of Wordsmithy . . .
This is what I would call a major public service announcement . .. Wordsmithy writer’s workshop Aug. 2-4 Books and Culture Editor and Christianity Today Editor-at-Large John Wilson will join best-selling author and New Saint Andrews College Fellow of Literature N.D. Wilson, New Saint Andrews College Senior Fellow and prolific author Douglas Wilson, and Poet and …