For many years, one of the things I have most liked to do is stick up for Puritans. If there is ever a contest for “most misrepresented” groups within the history of Christendom, the Puritans will certainly be in the final four, and would probably win the championship. Caricatured as stuffy, priggish, censorious, prim, prudish …
Book of the Month/July 2014
When reviewing a book written by a friend, there are two basic ways the thing could go, one of them very bad. Say that you had been duck hunting for forty years with your very bestest friend, and then, after retiring from his job as CEO of Whatsit, Inc. he gets it into his head …
Surface Appearances
So let me begin my comments about Son of God, the Movie by saying that there are tons of evangelicals who are excited about this movie because of the evangelistic opportunities it represents. Their motives are pure and happy, and I wish everybody well. I hope that lots of people who are given pre-bought theater …
Chesterton on Bunyan
One of my pet peeves (revealed to the world most recently in Wordsmithy) is the way that many modern Christians have been cool-shamed into a patronizing attitude on the literary merits of John Bunyan. I recently finished a great collection of Chesterton quotes put together by Kevin Belmonte, way to go Kevin, and was pleased …
Source Material
“Gravitas can also be inherited from relatively healthy families who simply tell their stories well. The southern novelists Flannery O’Connor once claimed that anyone who pays attention to his or her childhood could write novels for the rest of his or her life” (Barnes, The Pastor as Minor Poet, p. 50).
Christ Was No Stoic
Stoics have no imagination, no sense of rhythm. Like a frozen board behind the shed, they have no fire. “Christ was in an agony at prayer (Luke 22:44). Many when they pray are rather in a lethargy, than in an agony. When they are about the world, they are all fire; when they are at …
The Model to Copy
“The pillars of Donne’s biblical, Protestant poetics are: that the scriptures are the most eloquent books in the world, that God is a witty and also ‘a figurative, a metaphoricall God,’and that the religious lyric poet should endeavor to ‘write after . . . [his] Copie.'” (Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, p.282).
A Protestant Zenith
“Pointing the way to these heights more clearly than any of the works hitherto discussed is the poetic version of the Psalms produced by Sir Philip Sidney and his sister, Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke. As contemporary references to them demonstrate, though these psalms were not published for over two centuries, they were well known …
The Touchstone of Protestant Poetics
“The reasons for singling out David the Psalmist as the primary model for Christian poets no doubt include the very great spiritual significance and artistic worth ascribed to the Psalms in contemporary commentary, as well as their use for centuries in Christian liturgy. But in addition, the Psalms were seen to raise with special force …
Strongly Visual
“Whereas Crashaw renders an atmosphere by evoking a myriad of fleeting images from baroque sacred art and Jesuit emblem books, the Protestant poets often interpret biblical and sacred metaphors in images which are, like the Protestant discrete emblems, strongly visual, logically precise, and elaborately detailed” (Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, p. 197).