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...
A young aspiring pastor recently asked other pastors in a Facebook group what kinds of doubts they’ve had about Christianity, and what they’ve done with those doubts. I replied… I went through a several-month period of doubt during my senior year as a Bible major at...
Calvin of Calvin & Hobbes fame was sometimes targeted for abuse by a bully, Moe. Unfortunately, Calvin's clever retorts usually came to him hours after Moe's initial taunts. I've got a parallel situation: a minor instance of woke bullying was directed at me a few...
A friend of mine is something of a seeker, entertaining and exploring Christian faith and often apparently inhabiting it—but still struggling in a move from darkness to light. That’s the best way I know how to describe him. He wrote me an eloquent letter in which he...
When I first heard the story below, about a New York City public school, I didn’t believe it. It seemed too convenient, like something concocted for a fundraising letter. My wife had the same reaction. I read the whole piece to assure myself of the reliability of the...
Rcently, against my better judgment and somewhat by accident, I became involved in today’s predominant form of public discourse: an online discussion with strangers. I found myself the lone defender of the fairly straightforward idea (it seemed to me at the time) that...
My company offers incentives to employees every year to read business books. By this means I have gotten through some self-helpy stuff I admit I would have disdained otherwise. To be honest, I feel icky when I read books that purport to lead you to a successful life...
The following is a paper I delivered at the Bible Faculty Summit. The “Puritan canopy” that once overarched our city-on-a-hill began to fray and tear apart long ago—though that canopy always had its gaps (and its cotton-poly blends with American civil religion).1 The...
I read pretty much everything Alan Jacobs writes. This piece is at the top of the list of must-reads. It’s his assessment of the major storm between two conservatives: Sohrab Ahmari and David French. Let me try to spin Jacobs’ basic argument into the way I would put...
I had only one class with Ron Horton, Aesthetics—and I had to drop it when my little daughter was born. But I listened to enough lectures to know that the man was brilliant, and I read and enjoyed his book, Mood Tides. I respected him greatly. He died—into new...
What first attracted me to Rebecca McLaughlin’s Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World’s Largest Religion was the title. I actually assumed it was a non-Christian book. Second was the author: I read a piece of hers on TGC that I liked. Third, to be...