Enduring Counsel from B.B. Warfield
I regularly return to this enduring counsel from B. B. Warfield—required reading for all BJU seminarians who take Systematic Theology: A minister must be learned, on pain of being utterly incompetent for his work. But before and above being learned, a minister must be godly. Nothing could be more fatal, however, than to set these two things over against one another. Recruiting officers do not dispute whether it is better for soldiers to have a right leg or a left leg: soldiers should have both...
Mark Ward’s Miracle Word-Macro Wonder
The MWMWMW is now available for free—for a limited time only (till the Internet dies, I guess). Use this macro to 1) sharpen up any Word document and 2) impress nerdy people with proper use of a) en dashes and b) em dashes. This macro replaces -- with —. It also removes spaces surrounding em dashes, makes all hyphens between numbers into en dashes, turns all quotation marks and apostrophes into curvy quotes (as long as you have "Smart-quotes" turned on), replaces all double spaces with single...
Capitalism Samizdat
I read nearly everything Carl Trueman puts out; I always find his analyses helpful. And he writes very well English. And he's a nice, uh, bloke, I happen to know from personal experience. His recent review essay shows how easy it is to boast that we're not "conforming to the world"—without ever considering some of our culture's most basic influences on our worldview. I'm guilty, too. It's extraordinarily difficult to look at your own eyes without looking through them. Trueman's essay, in this...
A TV Ramble
With all these new flat screens, they can't really call it the "idiot box" anymore. What, "idiot slate"? Just remember: the medium is the message. And if you're watching the idiot box, what does that say? I get the biggest kick out of the vision of our society painted by Idiocracy, a film I don't plan to see but haven't stopped meditating upon since I read about it (warning: the linked essay is not appropriate for our kids—because our culture isn't). In the projected future of our TV-saturated...
Why I Believe Again
The fascinating testimony of a Christian turned atheist turned (recently) Christian who once wrote a controversial biography of C. S. Lewis: Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist “explanations” for our mysterious human existence simply won’t do – on an intellectual level. The phenomenon of language alone should give us pause. A materialist Darwinian was having dinner with me a few years ago and we...