Theology That Bites Back
The main category for book reviews and cultural interaction.
Defenders of the status quo in the intelligence world are beginning to sound an awful lot like Uncle Andrew from The Magician’s Nephew. “No, Digory. Men like me, who possess hidden wisdom, are freed from common rules just as we are cut off from common pleasures. Ours, my boy, is a high and lonely destiny.” …
The situation described in the following letters is entirely fictitious, including persons, names, crimes, sins, relationships, circumstances and all particulars. The kind of situation that is described, however, is all too common and my hope is that biblical principles applied to this fictitious scenario may be of some help to individuals tangled up in real …
Bring on the Girls by P.G. Wodehouse My rating: 3 of 5 stars This is not a Wodehouse novel, but is kind of a quasi-memoir, written together with Guy Bolton, about their time in the early twentieth century writing musical comedies together. It is pretty funny, and is replete with gossip from that era, including …
The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley My rating: 4 of 5 stars Very valuable read overall. Apart from the secularism and the evolutionary assumptions, Ridley does a great job of describing things in a way that counteracts the very common and insistent cultural pessimistic narrative. Postmillenialists need to read this kind of …
Introduction: In a certain sense, all the psalms are Messianic, all of them point to Jesus. But because this psalm is particularly dark, some might want to argue that perhaps it is less the case here. But I think we should actually go the other way. This psalm is in fact dark, but consider the …
I have often said that I write for the same reason that dogs bark. Ah, someone might reply, but why do you write the way you do? There are two ways to describe this “way” of writing, the first using words like zest, verve, color, and manly courage, and the second being a detailed description …
It is not uncommon for me to conduct wedding ceremonies, and one of the questions I usually ask the couple during the premarital counseling is what the composition of the assembly is likely to be. When I preach, everybody is there more or less voluntarily, and they know what they are likely to be getting. …
As Yogi Berra once purportedly said, “You can observe a lot by just watching.” I have been most interested in watching how the Russian-election-hacking story played out, linked, as it has now been, to the president’s spectacular accusation against the former president this last weekend. The president said that Obama had ordered Trump Tower be …
Introduction: There are only two “ways,” two fundamental religions in the world. One of them feeds people, and the other one eats people. We see this contrast in vivid relief in the juxtaposition that Mark gives to the death of John the Baptist. That sad but typical episode is followed immediately by the feeding of …
