Theology That Bites Back
The main category for book reviews and cultural interaction.
A parishioner sent me a link to this NYT op-ed because it was floating around social media, and she wanted to know if I had a quick take on it. I do, actually. If you don’t want to read the piece, knowing that you will never get those minutes back again, the set-up is a …
Introduction: Sometimes, after I have thrown a Molotov cocktail or two, meaning by this an incendiary adjective, or hot incandescent metaphor, a number of my friends who follow this blog have counted to twenty-five, muttering to themselves all the while that they know there is going to be a follow-up post, one that will seek …
A Little Book on the Christian Life by John Calvin My rating: 4 of 5 stars Very good. Straight to the point, a lot of them. View all my reviews
The situation described in the following letters continues to be 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 …
The second chapter of Dreher’s The Benedict Option is really quite good overall. I found myself agreeing with much of it, and agreeing also with the various qualifications Dreher made as he went along. What he does in this chapter is give a brief intellectual history of the West’s apostasy, and in the main, he …
So I would like to invite you to read through The Benedict Option with me. For the most part we will go a chapter at a time, although this first time out we will take the Introduction and Chapter One together. For various reasons this is an important book, and how we respond to it …
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 …
