Derek Kidner in The Message of Ecclesiastes: As to man’s dignity, what is so mortifying (an appropriate word!) about death’s final leveling of wise men and fools—to which we could add, "good men and bad," "saints and sadists," and every other pair of opposites—is that...
Mission
Five Responses to the Newsweek Screed
The 9,000-word, Merry-Christmas, anti-Christian Newsweek screed opens with the following attempt at journalistic objectivity: They wave their Bibles at passersby, screaming their condemnations of homosexuals. They fall on their knees, worshipping at the base of...
Christian Apologetics Already Ceding Ground to Secularism
I'm really enjoying James K. A. Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor. Smith is a guide to Protestants who want some help from Taylor's massive A Secular Age but who don't have the gumption to wade through it all. And I just keep highlighting and...
The Odd Bible Translation Situation We’re In
The Book of Mormon (1830) and the Pickthal translation of the Qur'an (1930), both completed long after "thee" and "thou" faded from common English usage, both adopted the archaic syntactical and grammatical forms used in the KJV. Why? Here's the Book of Mormon: Holy,...
Alone in the New America
This article describes the working-class demographic quite literally surrounding my church (with one notable exception, a gated community on the north side). The article offers an accurate diagnosis of their woes—through terribly sad anecdotes—and then an insufficient...
The Wisdom of Men and the Power of God
Read this this morning: And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in...
The Moral Argument
I just noticed an interesting entry in a New York Times series of interviews with major thinkers organized by Notre Dame philosophy professor Gary Gutting. Up to bat in this edition is Michael Ruse, author of Atheism: What Everyone Needs to Know, and decorated...
New Article on Medium.com
I just posted an evangelistic/apologetic article on Medium.com. Please check it out. And pray for it to have some success. Wicked Ignorance
Teaching Japanese Christianly
A friend wrote me in my capacity as a member of the Bible Integration Team at BJU Press: Honestly, I struggle ... as I teach Japanese. I do talk about how learning languages and other cultures is important from Christian perspective etc. at the beginning of the school...
C. S. Lewis on Honest Opinions
In the rich, classic story The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis pictures a Christian and an atheist discussing the claims of Christianity. Both were scholars of a sort. They grew up together; they were schooled together; they lost their faith together. Then one of them,...
Sociological Insight into Broken Working-Class Families
I minister in a low-income community; I wish I could say I do more for my parishioners than I do. I preach, I love, I pray. And I think about them all the time. A while back I read Coming Apart: The State of White America , 1960–2010 in an effort to understand their...
Review: The Insanity of God: A True Story of Faith Resurrected
The Insanity of God: A True Story of Faith Resurrected by Nik Ripken My rating: 4 of 5 stars A truly remarkable book. Very stirring and edifying. If I say, "a little light on the scriptural exegesis," don't think that in saying this I believe myself to be worthy to...