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...
John Calvin and Lamin Sanneh on Giving the Bible to the People
My book, Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible, amounts to an argument for vernacular Bible translation—applied to one specific set of objections in one specific historical circumstance. I find myself repeating myself as I promote the book on podcasts and radio shows, and I also find other writers who agree that vernacular translation is of the utmost importance. Here are two quick arguments/quotes/what-have-yous on vernacular translation. I'm not the only one who thinks it's...
Review of NKJV Unapologetic Study Bible
The NKJV Unapologetic Study Bible (subtitle: Confidence for Such a Time as This) is a fruit of the ministry of the Kairos Journal, a conservative evangelical publication dedicated to making timely application of the Bible to the cultural season in which we find ourselves in the Western world. This edition features over two-hundred page-long article inserts drawn from Kairos on multiple topics, all of which are related somehow to the passages of Scripture near which they are inserted. The...
In Which I Beat Critics to the Punch, a Punch I Deserve
My new book Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible has inside it what I now take to be an error. Probably. But one I already hedged. In the book I give about three dozen examples of “false friends,” words which we still use but which meant something different in 1611—in such a way that modern readers usually won’t notice. This is the key concept of the entire book, and one of my examples, added at the last minute as my deadline neared, I now believe doesn’t belong in the list....