Death By Living is due to be released in just a few weeks. A follow-up to Notes From the Tilt-a-Whirl, this book brings us a lot more of the same — Chestertonian exuberance, vivid descriptions, and the romance of orthodoxy. One of the perks we have in our family is that we get to read …
When There Is No Ham in the Ham Sandwich
Here is a post that illustrates, as few other things could, the need to read our political and historical narratives in a biblical way. In this post, the author, Jada Thacker, argues that the Constitution was not about limited government at all, and that Tea Partiers and their ilk (ilk is just a great word, …
Evolutionary Heritage Days
The next chapter of Coyne’s book is on vestigia, atavistic throwbacks, embryonic recapitulation, topped off with alleged screw-ups in the so-called process of intelligent design. Let’s start with this last item, since we should be able to dispense with it in a paragraph or so. The structure of this argument is strange, in that Coyne …
Arriving Daily
“Pastoral snarls are like the mercies of God — they are new every morning” (Evangellyfish, p. 175).
Always Ready to Forgive
“But you can have a heart full of forgiveness, full to the brim, ready to overflow the moment repentance appears. Until that happens, there is no forgiveness. We need to distinguish forgiveness in principle and forgiveness accomplished” (For a Glory and a Covering, p. 95).
The Fourth of July: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Genuine patriotism is not surprised or derailed by flaws, sins or wickedness in the object of our love. Sentimental patriotism, by contrast, treats love of country the same way a maudlin Hallmark card writer would treat, after three beers, love of mother. Mothers Day becomes a high, holy, and sacred thing — a sanctifying thing, …
Just a Hoot
Book of the Month/July
I have read and enjoyed and profited from a number of Iain Murray’s other books, and in the realm of enjoyment and edification, this book was no different. But it was very different from his other books in several other respects. The book-of-the-month this time around is The Undercover Revolution, and it is about how …
Like Watching a Hummingbird Fly
As previously mentioned, here is my second installment on chapter two of Coyne’s book. As this chapter makes apparent, long stretches of time are essential to the project of evolutionary hand-waving, a process whereby impossible things are made more plausible to us by having them happen very, very slowly. Don’t think I can walk across …
That’s A Rabbit, You Doofus
Comes now chapter two of Jerry Coyne’s book, called Written in the Rocks. It will take a post or two to deal with this chapter, so patience, all of you. My first post will address the structure of his argumentation, and later I will look at the time involved in all this — my own …