So then, Jerry Coyne now comes to explain, in the famous phrase, the origin of species. How is it that wherever we look we see distinct species, and not a long blur of intermediate types and missing links between each of the species? In addressing this question, he sets out laboriously to prove something that …
Metaphor or Five
These are my notes for a portion of the Wordsmithy conference we held, just now concluded. Many thanks to the students who participated. You will soon discover that I am using the word metaphor in a broad sense. Some allow it to expand to include simile—this is that, and this is like that are close …
Crowdsourcing Adam
Tim Bayly discusses a very troublesome drift on certain key questions relating to Adam here. If I might, I would like to add just a couple of comments. First, just as we evaluate individual lives by the video, and not by the snapshot, so also we should measure churches, denominations, seminaries, and so on, in …
More Than Enough Butterscotch
“This was not really supposed to mean anything in particular, but the elders were not about to press him on it. All they wanted was for smooth words to flow over them (and everybody else in the audience) like molten butterscotch, and it was looking as though they were going to get everything they were …
No Convenience Store Holiness
“There is such a thing as righteousness on the earth and righteousness within marriage. It is not the case that a backslidden Christian is under one hundred feet of water, and the godliest saint who ever lived is only under three feet of water, but both of them are equally wet. Rather, obedience and disobedience, …
The Racoons of Market Share
“During the scandal, before Chad had accepted the pressure to resign, these graphics impresarios had been just so many advertising hounds locked in the kennels of indecision, with the racoons of market share running through the woods pretty much as they pleased” (Evangellyfish, p. 202).
Done With Sin
“Sometimes those in the Reformed tradition have tended to emphasize our remaining sinfulness to such an extent that we begin to exhibit a stubborn willfulness about it. While a casual and breezy perfectionism is of course to be rejected — and rejected with loathing — it remains the case that God commands us to be …
Book of the Month/August
I owe a lot to George Gilder, and with his release of Knowledge and Power, that debt has increased significantly. Decades ago, I first read Sexual Suicide, a book that later became Men and Marriage, and which I have read again several times in that form. I was greatly influenced by Wealth and Poverty when …
That Jaw-Jutty Way
“He was professional, cut, chiseled. His slacks had a crease in them that could cut weeds if he walked through a field of tall grass, not that he did this very often. His one idiosyncratic feature was that he always looked like he was chewing beef jerky whenever he talked, but most people who even …
Never Shortchanged
“We have no ‘right’ to marital happiness by whatever means necessary (including easy divorce standards) . . . Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward, and our troubles vary. Some of us have trouble with our health, others with finances, others with difficult neighbors, and still others have family or marriage troubles. …