What’s needed around here is a good definition of the word cool. We all know what is intended whenever we encounter it in a sentence, but a clear understanding nevertheless remains elusive. One individual is successfully cool. Another makes the attempt, with tragic results, and even a lowly junior high student knows to roll his …
Well, That’s Fun
Nate’s Leepike Ridge has been out for almost a week. As I have noted here before, it got some very good pre-release reviews, but Books & Culture has now named it their book of the week. You can find their review of it here. Go, fight, win.
Fifth Installment of the Hitchens/Wilson Debate
Christianity Today has now posted the fifth exchange between Christopher Hitchens and me. This is the penultimate round, with the final round going up next week. You can find it here.
The Hebraic Mind
Careful students of church history see far more in it than names and dates, battles and councils, popes and reformers. The history of the church is very much a history of ideas. But in order to talk about the course and influence of these ideas, we have to talk about the various schools of philosophy …
Pornostan
“What do you call a jurisdiction split between post-Christian secular gay potheads and anti-whoring anti-sodomite anti-everything-you-dig Islamists? If Kurdistan’s an awkward fit in Iraq, how well does Pornostan fit in the Islamic Republic of Holland?” (Mark Steyn, America Alone, p. 120).
Huxley and Orwell
“Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy . . . This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right” (Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. vii-viii).
Watery, Obsolescent, Soft-Left Pap
“The United States has a strain of evangelical Protestantism strong enough to grow in the years ahead. Unfortunately, there is no such surging evangelicalism in Europe. In search of the guiding hand of God, some Europeans will return to Pope Benedict’s church, some will accept Islam, but there will be no takers for the archbishop …
Obvious When You Think About It
“Television is not vulgar because people are vulgar; it is vulgar because people are similar in their prurient interests and sharply differentiated in their civilized concerns” (George Gilder, Life After Television, p. 48).
That Ringleader Pride
“Though there are many in a riot, the whole blame usually is laid upon the ringleaders. Pride is the ringleader of all riots, divisions, and disturbances among us” (Burroughs, Irenicum, p. 158).
A Review of Leepike Ridge
Okay, let me get a couple things out of the way right at the outset. The first and most obvious is that I am embarking on a review of a novel written by my son, a story that I think is a real premium can of corn. So to speak. And so someone out there …