Kim on Carr on How Our Tools Shape Us
Joseph Kim at Second Nature quotes Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains: Over the last few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain…. I used to find it easy to immerse myself in a book or a lengthy article. My mind would get caught up in the twists of the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore.... What the Net...
Are People Basically Good or Bad?
For as long as I can remember, the idea that people are basically good has been taken to be a tenet of theological and political liberalism. The idea that people are basically bad has been presented to me as a tenet of Christianity—and this tenet has been held by both the Calvinists and the Arminians I've known. This is a conservative Christian meme, at least when we're talking about political views. "If only liberals (or Marxists, etc.) could recognize that man is inherently evil, they...
Authoritative Application?
My respected friend Joel Arnold probably does need to leave this country, as he currently plans to do. What he says is downright un-American: Believers have not obeyed God's commands until they are willing to make authoritative and spiritually guided application of biblical principles to every area of life (2 Tim. 4:2; Tit. 2:15). There are a few debatable applications in which believers might justifiably differ (Rom. 14; 1 Cor. 8, 10). In such cases, liberty is not a right or a mandate but...
Stanley Fish Paper Published in Answers Research Journal
I've been kind of super excited about this... I have finally thrown my tiny pebble into the pond! Now I'm just waiting to watch the ripples. Well, it's probably more like this: I have finally thrown my grain of sand into the ocean! Now I'm just waiting to be bitten by a jellyfish. I have published an article on apologetics and Stanley Fish in the Answers Research Journal. Here's the page on which you'll find it (pages 265–278, toward the bottom). And here's a direct link to the PDF. It was a...
The Kingdom of Christ
I'm embarrassed to say I did not know this, more embarrassed to admit that I never thought to ask: The move toward a Kingdom theology [among both covenantalists and dispensationalists] ... accounts for the name of the newer form of dispensationalism. It is called "progressive" not because it is more contemporary than other forms of dispensationalism but rather because in it "the dispensations progress by revealing different aspects of the final unified redemption," namely the eschatological...