Barack Obama on Faith in the Public Square
For the first time in many years, a radio station other than NPR has managed—sometimes—to win my listenership during my daily commute. It’s 92.9 FM, aka Christian Talk 660. I have to admit I usually can’t stand the brash talk programs (the one exception is local pastor Kevin Boling’s more humble and theologically minded program “Knowing the Truth”). I tend to listen for the preachers. The talk programs have too much politico-religious fulminating even for my fundamentalist ears. Exhibit A: I...
Review: The Priority of Preaching
The Priority of Preaching by Christopher Ash My rating: 3 of 5 stars Christopher Ash is a preacher who trains preachers, and his little book The Priority of Preaching provides a unique angle on that training. He mines the example of Moses' long sermon in Deuteronomy for the contemporary (expository) preacher. He places particular weight on the fact that Moses predicts that a succession of prophets will serve Israel—to them the Jews were told to listen (Deut. 18:15–22). The content of their...
TGC on ER2
D. A. Carson knows a thing or two, and I appreciated his candor and his demeanor in this response to the Elephant Room—what else can you call it?—debacle. Tim Keller contributed, too, but I thought Carson’s voice predominated (as a blogger, by definition, I could be wrong). The categories of Biblicism One and Biblicism Two are helpful far beyond this immediate debate.
A Blogger After My Own Heart
This guy, a doctoral candidate in linguistics, has a whole blog dedicated to the same mission my posts about Lexicographical Prescriptivism are. He writes on his about page, Grammar is a contentious point. Some argue that it’s horrifyingly appalling that ANYONE would ever utter the words “I drive pretty good”. (This, of course, is because good is an adjective, good is modifying drive, which is a verb, and our forefathers fought and died so that verbs would never be subjugated by adjectives.)...
Toggl Desktop
One of the problems with using any time-tracking software is that you actually have to tell it what you're doing and when you start and stop. I mean, shouldn't it just know? Toggl Desktop has taken one step toward solving that problem for me: it lets me know if I've left my computer idle for an extended period of time and asks me if I want to drop that dead time from my tracking. Now, I could've been reading a book and just not touching the computer. But it's still nice to have that reminder...