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...
One of my wife’s best Christian friends at our homeschool group is the wife of the talented music director at a large area church. This couple has become respected friends of ours, and recently they asked us to house two singers from a choir that was visiting their...
Theodore Gioia in the L.A. Review of Books: In the mass-media era, the general public primarily experiences classical music through detached snippets of larger pieces extracted to lend their symbolic power to a commercial agenda. Artists and advertisers dissect...
Ember Rising by S.D. Smith My rating: 5 of 5 stars Loved it. So did the kids. (And the illustrations, by my respected friend Zach Franzen, were also excellent.) For a good while I was thinking that this book is The Benedict Option for kids—and for adults who dutifully...
My heart goes out to Tara Westover. I rooted for her and felt defensive for her during 100% of the story. Other people’s epistemological sins harmed her. Precisely because of her love for her parents, those sins maintained a hold on her far, far into a life that, on...
It's Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies by Mary Eberstadt My rating: 3 of 5 stars This book is a diligent concatenation of stories of anti-Christian liberal prejudice in the modern West. Not one was new to me. Every one was alarming, but not (to...
When popular Harvard political theorist Michael Sandel was a graduate student at Oxford in the 1970s, men and women were still separated into different colleges. Further befitting a staid institution such as Oxford, male visitors were not permitted to remain overnight...
Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy by Mark Regnerus My rating: 5 of 5 stars A quick check of the Goodreads reviews for Cheap Sex by sociologist Mark Regnerus suggests to me that everyone has strong feelings about this book—which tends to...
By page 3 of most self-help books, I start hearing a cheery person intoning in the background, I'm good enough, I'm smart enough. By page 10: And, doggone it, people like me! Without denying that I should Win Friends and Influence People, go from Good to Great, and...