Thanks for Praying
I talked with John McWhorter this morning for about 45 minutes to record an episode of Lexicon Valley focused on my new book, Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible. I'm an even bigger fan of the guy after this experience; I'm still both shocked and over the moon that he'd pick up a book by a no-name Christian author and actually read it. He did, as his interview questions prove, and he totally got it, as I knew he would. I encourage you to sign up for his podcast, as I have...
Dating in the Fifties, Sex in the Sixties
Probing thoughts from Kenneth Woodward, long-time religion correspondent for Newsweek (as in 1964–2002!), in his fascinating memoir, Getting Religion: Most adolescents in the Fifties were raised to observe certain sexual limits—just as lovers did in the movies from which we took our cultural cues. Like them, we kissed and groped in the backseats of cars, or at night on the beach, but hardly anyone I knew had intercourse. The thrill of the erotic, we learned, extended all along a line that...
MacCulloch on the Reformation and Homosexuality
At the very end of Diarmaid MacCulloch's magisterial (what other word is there for such a book?) The Reformation: A History, he offers some brief assessments of where the various Christian churches are today. This is one comment he makes about the movement that arose out of the subject of his book: Protestantism is faced with [a] momentous challenge to its assumptions of authority: the increasing acceptance in western societies of homosexual practice and identity as one valid and unremarkable...
Rusting the Sword of the Spirit
I heard Mark Noll say this a while back, and it was really striking. May it not be true of me or you (cf. Matt 7:1–5): The Bible has been a great weapon for attacking people you don't like: "You shall not crucify me on a cross of gold!" It has been a much rustier sword when used on the self.
Review: Michael Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets
What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets by Michael J. Sandel My rating: 5 of 5 stars I find it incredibly refreshing to find any writer who sees through the tempting veneer secularism has laid not just on our politics but on our lives. It's a tempting veneer, because it is very hard—impossible, intractable—to find agreement with those whose "vision of the good life," whose ways of valuing things, are different from one's own. But those differences must be solved: either we're going...