“His preaching is like a painted fire, no one is either cheered or alarmed by it” (Charles Spurgeon, An All-Round Ministry, p. 207).
Catechized by Fairy Tales
“Good magic and bad magic in truthful stories correspond to true religion and false religion in our real world . . . True religion is about surrender, while false religion is about control” (Michael D. O’Brian, A Landscape With Dragons, p. 29).
A Corker from Peter Hitchens
Peter Hitchens has written a corker about the Archbishop of C, a corker which I would commend to you here. I am constantly astounding by those who think that fruit can mysteriously continue to show up in crates every autumn after we have chopped down the tree in June. As in C.S. Lewis’ famous observation …
Teeny Idols
There are two kinds of loyalty, one good and one bad. If you are fiercely loyal to your family, to your nation, to your church, or doctrinal traditions, and that loyalty results in you maintaining (emotionally, if not actually) that the object of your loyalty could never do wrong, or be in the wrong, then …
Providence and Covenant
We live in community, which means in part that we feed one another. We live in community under God, which means that we are dependent upon God—He feeds us. If He did not give the rain, if He did not make the crops grow, we would all of us starve. We want a strong doctrine …
All Three of the Flying Bambino Brothers
This is archived under “Book Review” but it is not really a book review proper. It is more of a statement. Last April I finished reading a short book by David Bentley Hart called The Doors of the Sea, a theological reaction to the Asian tsunami. In my short book log review, I just said …
Why the Horse Isn’t Dead
I have mentioned before the atheism jag that I have been on, and even if I hadn’t mentioned it, it would have been obvious. Just last week I posted covers of some of the new titles coming out. One thought that has occurred to me is that a number of Christians may be thinking, “For …
Fatherhood Gruel
I said in an early post on this theme that eating disorders and food-fad disorders were a function of father hunger. Time to unpack that a bit. This is just a beginning, because it is a huge subject. One of the great problems we have in conservative Christian circles is that of accepting slanders about …
Our Daily Taste
“O Lord, refresh our sensibilities. Give us this day our daily taste. Restore to us soups that spoons will not sink in, and sauces which are never the same twice” (Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb, p. 27).
What Sin Is
We have to look at three other renderings of anomia. The word is translated as unrighteousness in 2 Cor. 6:14. “Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?” In 1 John 3:4, the word is used twice in order to give …