A sadly funny excerpt from Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea: Mi-ran’s mother later told her that four of her father’s buddies in the mines, fellow South Koreans, had been executed for minor infractions, their bodies dumped in mass graves. Being a member...
Books
Chronological Snobbery
I don’t want to be, but I think I’ve been stuck in what C.S. Lewis calls “chronological snobbery.” I pick up an old book—most recently, Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics—and I can’t really read it without my fingers crossed. I can never shake the...
North Korea
I took one day out of my paternity leave for pleasure reading. I selected a new Kindle book I bought after hearing the author interviewed on NPR: Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. It was utterly fascinating. I devoured it. Demick weaves a gripping...
Poythress Kan’t Wright… j/k
I was reading Vern Poythress’ Symphonic Theology for a little help on linguistics and biblical hermeneutics, and he quoted Immanuel Kant: This debt [of radically evil disposition] can never be discharged by another person, so far as we can judge according to the...
Frame / Φρειμ / פרֵם
I wrote this for a Bible Truths lesson on evangelism: …that’s the extent of your responsibility—just faithfully, clearly, and lovingly deliver the message. The Bible compares evangelists to heralds, people whose job it was to journey to a faraway place and announce...
Insight
An insightful comment on economics applying to all disciplines from Paul Collier, Oxford prof and author of The Bottom Billion: Part of the reason single-factor theories about development failure are so common is that modern academics tend to specialize: they are...
Andy Crouch on Postures and Gestures
Over the last few months since work (and baby!) deadlines led me to drop Andy Crouch’s Culture Making, waiting to pick it up again some day soon, I’ve thought many times about his model for describing typical Christian cultural engagement. He sees four typical...
BDAG Could Be a Much Bigger Book
This is what its entry on ἀγάπη looks like in BDAG, the standard Greek lexicon. This is what it looks like uncompacted, with all of its separate points turned into descended bullets: It’s like unfolding some incredible origami! I find I can’t use the...
Interesting! What People at My Alma Mater Are Reading!
Check it out.
A Good Warning for Bloggers and Dissertation Writers
John Frame in “Machen’s Warrior Children,” regarding theological polemics in his community (and, let’s face it, ours): Overall, the quality of thought displayed in these polemics has not been a credit to the Reformed tradition. Writers have gone to great lengths to...
Found!
A friend sent my request for help to a friend, and the lost egalitarian/complementarian illustration has been found! (Thank you!) Only my memory didn’t serve me with 100% accuracy. Here’s the original: David Gushee did not convert to complementarianism, but perhaps...
Please Help!
Several years ago, in something like 2005 (?), I read an article (?) by an evangelical theologian (?) who had been an egalitarian. His story was something like this: I was an evangelical Christian egalitarian. My wife and I split our marriage in half: everything was...