Antidisclaimer
After a while, reading and writing disclaimers about theological books gets to be a real annoyance. “Of course, I don’t agree with everything this book says, but I still think it’s worth a read.” “Naturally, I take exception to some of this writer’s assertions.” “I can’t support all the things this writer says and does outside his writing.” Disclaimers are indeed necessary sometimes. But they are probably implicit in any review. Who does agree with everything anyone else says? What...
Five Steps to Pleasure
I listened to Marvin Olasky interview Stanley Fish, in part about his new book, How to Write a Sentence. Stanley Fish cited a great sentence in this piece by John Updike, and further called that piece the greatest sport essay in history—if my memory serves. I saved the piece to my Instapaper account in the afternoon. I read the piece on my iPod Touch while giving my pregnant wife a backrub. I thoroughly enjoyed it; excellent writing. Here was one great line: “For Williams to have distributed...
Wise Advice On The Balance Between Submission to Leaders and Personal Responsibility
The church must balance analytical independence (1 Thess. 5:21) with submissiveness to its leaders (1 Thess. 5:13; Heb. 13:7, 17; Gal. 1:8–9). We “obey [our] leaders” and we “test everything.” Yet we test humbly, reticent to question pastors who have been called by God, then trained, tested, and approved by the church. Contrary to contemporary sensibilities, not all opinions are equal. Dan Doriani, Putting the Truth to Work: The Theory and Practice of Biblical Application (Phillipsburg, NJ:...
Get Motivated!
All the Cool People from another sector of American reality, a much bigger sector than mine, are coming to my town. Plenty of dogs and ponies will make an appearance in the show. But I am more interested in the promised goods. I’m told that if I come, I will get motivated to succeed in making money! Now, people are already motivated to make money; they just reach a point of equilibrium where their desire for more and their hope in that possibility is balanced out by their real-life physical...
How to Clear Up Space in Your Gmail Inbox
I was up to 87% full in Gmail, but there was no way I was going to search for every e-mail that had an attachment (type “has:attachment” in the search box), because I couldn’t sort by size. So I could spend hours deleting e-mails and gain only 1% back. I did search for “filename:.mov” to get rid of one kind of file that I knew was big. Even that would take forever, so I cast about for another way. I finally found it: use Outlook to download headers only, then sort by message file size, then...