Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life by William Deresiewicz My rating: 4 of 5 stars As diagnosis, this book is outstanding. Elite education for America’s elite has become a vast exercise in getting our high-achieving students all dressed up for the ball, and then never actually …
Book of the Month/October 2016
The Unseen Realm is a true resource, but it is the kind of resource that you are likely to read clean through, and then read through some other time, and then keep it nearby in order to refresh your memory on this or that. Too many contemporary Christians are modernists when it comes to their …
Review: The Life of God in the Soul of Man
The Life of God in the Soul of Man by Henry Scougal My rating: 4 of 5 stars Very good book over all, and one with some magnificent passages. View all my reviews
The Truth Has Preachers, Not Sponsors
“We want to be careful that we don’t participate in an unseemly scramble for the big names to adorn our position, as though theology were a particular kind of shaving cream that needs a second baseman for the Yankees to endorse it” (Writers to Read, p. 66).
Review: Slavery in Early Christianity
Slavery in Early Christianity by Jennifer A. Glancy My rating: 4 of 5 stars Very good book, a wealth of information. Jennifer Glancy is at times hindered in her analysis by assuming too much purported differences between different authors of Scripture, and this gets in the way at times. She doesn’t reason with any expectation …
On Wearing the Zeitgeist’s Demento-Hat
Everybody is making a big deal out of the fact that Hillary, if elected, would be the first woman president. Have we not grown beyond this yet? It is evident on the face of it that, if elected, she would only be the first known woman president. What matters is self-identification, right? And out of …
Sort of a Trade Off
Not Wowsers at All
“We are victims of anachronistic slander if we think that the Puritans were in any way, well, puritanical. That term came to be applied to the bluenoses and wowsers well after the Puritan party had brought back into Christian discipleship an incarnational embrace of all material things” (Writers to Read, pp. 65-66).
Like a Seed
“Every culture has a religious center, and every religion, like a seed, given water, sunlight, and nutrients, grows up into a particular plant” (Writers to Read, p. 62).
Bringing a Feather Duster to a Gun Fight
So here is the situation. Richard Swinburne was invited to give a talk at the Society of Christian Philosophers. His topic, on which he had previously published, was to defend the biblical and traditional view of human sexuality. Because his talk offended some, the SCP apologized for any harm done by the talk. And here …