Edwards Quote Success!
John Piper’s foundational sermon for his philosophy of Christian Hedonism is entitled “Let Your Passion Be Single.” In it he quotes Jonathan Edwards as saying this (I’ll include Piper’s two interpolations): I should think myself in the way of my duty, to raise the affections [emotions] of my hearers as high as I possibly can, provided"—then he gave two qualifications—"provided they are affected with nothing but truth, and with affections that are not disagreeable to the nature of...
The Degradation Of Language And Why We Should, Such As, Care
A teacher of mine heard me expounding my Usage Determines Meaning doctrines and sent me a courteous e-mail in which he offered one rejoinder to my laissez-faire attitude toward usage. He pointed to a sentence he had just read in a student paper: At the extreme were men like Alexander Campbell... He objected to the student’s use of “like” instead of “such as,” saying, I know exactly what [the student] means. And from my reading experience, it’s a widely used expression. Am I wrong for marking...
Modern Pilgrim
I just got to write a fun article for a brand new BJU Press online publication, Modern Pilgrim. Feel free to check it out!
Beckwith Back With Rome
Frances Beckwith, former president of the Evangelical Theological Society, has converted back to the Roman Catholicism of his youth. That’s old news as the blogosphere counts slackness. It’s becoming old news, too, that Dinesh D’Souza, who a lot of people thought was Catholic, recently became the president of the—a lot of people thought—evangelical Protestant King’s College. What I found most interesting was Beckwith’s response to the ensuing dustup. Beckwith, who knows evangelicalism and...
How to Get Married
Every few months I take a detailed look at my blog stats, and for several years I have had one unexpectedly popular post: “How to Get Married.” The post was actually a joke. My advice was to get Parallels Desktop for Mac software; pretty soon you’ll be married (worked for me). But as I kept seeing this post near the top of my hits rating, I got a sense of sadness that so many people (guys? girls?) would be turning to the Internet for advice on this topic. So imagine I’m not the Internet but an...