The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? by Michael J. SandelMy rating: 5 of 5 starsI loved Sandel's book Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? His power is incisive analysis: he cuts to the Augustinian heart of divisive issues using classic...
The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution by Carl R. Trueman.My rating: 5 of 5 stars I'm hoping to publish in a journal a more extensive review of this excellent—though long and at times...
This video on “white supremacy” in Western music theory recently got some attention from intelligent friends and acquaintances. It claims that Western music theory is racist—white supremacist, to be precise—for teaching only the musical style of 18th century European...
There’s a young man I know from Christian circles somewhere in the U.S.—I’ll call him Kyle or Gerald or Edward, or maybe something a little more derogatory—who posted what I can only call an anti-girls-going-to-college meme on Facebook. It argued that Christian...
Bavinck: A Critical Biography My rating: 5 of 5 starsHerman Bavinck's fame as a theologian has been steadily growing in my circles—especially since the Dutch Translation Society began putting out his Reformed Dogmatics in English in 2003. All four volumes sit proudly...
A brand new book I wrote this past year, Basics for a Biblical Worldview has just been released. It's a sixth grade biblical worldview textbook for BJU Press. For this project I was privileged to rejoin as a freelancer the team I was on at BJU Press for nine years,...
A female professor of Christian ministry just sent me a survey to fill out. I don't consider myself an expert in this area, but I certainly have tried to be responsible—this is one of those places where the battle over truth is fiercest in my generation. Here were my...
One of my walking buddies at work is a statistician who does data analysis for our company. Of statistics, I guess. I always enjoy talking to him; I like the way his mind works. I’ve long been interested in epistemology, the question of how we know—how we justify our...
Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence by Alex BerensonMy rating: 5 of 5 starsFor every book there is an equal and opposite book. I read Smoke Signals by Martin Lee in preparation for my own small coauthored book, Can I Smoke Pot?...
A story in pictures. Because this new ESV Bible—the ESV Heirloom Single Column Personal Size Bible—needs only a one-word review: exquisite. Bloggers write words when none are needed, however, because the word-count of the internet is not yet full—so I will oblige with...
The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter IsaacsonMy rating: 5 of 5 starsSomehow some writers of biography end up sounding trite, both in their relating of their subjects' stories and in the lessons they draw...
From the difficult-to-watch documentary (available on Netflix), One Child Nation. So profoundly sad and sobering. For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They...