A Great Pro-Protestant Argument against Sacred Tradition from Ross Douthat
Matthew Lee Anderson and Derek Rishmawy just spoke on their Mere Fidelity podcast to my favorite New York Times columnist, the conservative Catholic Ross Douthat, about his new book To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism, a work critiquing the current pope for his push toward liberalizing the body he leads. Rishmawy went rather around the block and back again to say it, but I felt he made an excellent point (my transcript, which I spent my whole commute on the bus...
Great Books for Sale!
I love Narnia—my whole family does—and my favorite little book on that wonderful land is a meditation on Narnia by an author who learned a few things there. It's now $2.99 on Kindle—for a brief time. Get it! There is a veritable ton of great ebooks for sale to celebrate T4G 2018. (Can there be a ton of ebooks? I mean, do two ebooks even weigh more than one ebook?)
A Handy Guide to Catching Spam Comments
Look out for these things in your comment spam (some apply to email spam, too), and you're less likely to be fooled by it (click image to see full-size): I don't really mean that Australia is weird, though I may find out this summer that it is as I take my first trip to the land down under. Germans aren't weird, either. But most of my legitimate commenters are Americans; that's all I'm saying. Aussie bloggers might want to be aware of comments ostensibly from Americans!
An Answer to One of My Top Two Critics
I just wrote a 2,200-word response to a fairly brief Amazon review. I’m either OCD or just O. But it takes obsession to write a good book, I’m convinced—and to keep up with the promotion and then the discussion the book generates. I really care about this issue, and I've been itching to hear from accredited critics. But nota bene: it’s your own fault if you read this. You’re feeding my obsession. I did wait weeks to post this, just to make sure I wasn’t overreacting. I hope the waiting worked....
Alan Jacobs on How to Think
Jacobs' new book, How to Think, is great. This is great: I’d bet a large pile of cash money that thousands of people read Adrian Chen’s profile of Megan Phelps-Roper and said, to others or to themselves, “Ah, a wonderful account of what happens when a person stops believing what she’s told and learns to think for herself.” But here’s the really interesting and important thing: that’s not at all what happened. Megan Phelps-Roper didn’t start “thinking for herself”—she started thinking with...