David Brooks, Harvey Weinstein, and Original Sin
I always like David Brooks, even when I have to disagree—or quibble. Not that he should care what an obscure redheaded conservative Christian blogger thinks… Except that I think he pays attention to religion in a way no other opinion columnist at the New York Times does, aside of course from Ross Douthat. Brooks' recent column about the origins of sexual predation among men looked like it was going to be helpful and insightful, as usual, but then it took the turn from helpful description to...
Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible
Pre-order the book in Logos here and in print here. The book should be available for pre-order on Amazon soon.
Review: The Vanishing American Adult by Ben Sasse
The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis—and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance by Ben Sasse My rating: 4 of 5 stars A good-hearted, tough-minded, generous, hopeful, Mr.-Smith-goes-to-Washington who nonetheless knows his Augustine (and, more importantly, his Paul) well enough to take account of human depravity in his politics. An earnest, Christian, Ivy-league educated, cornfields-to-Congress husband and father and former university president who saw sad deficiencies in...
What Erasmus Thought of the First of Luther’s 95 Theses
The first of Luther’s 95 Theses was basically a critique of Jerome’s translation of “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Jerome had translated this poenitentiam agite, which renders something like “Do penance.” Luther, just a few months after writing the 95 Theses, wrote to Staupitz, I became so bold as to believe that they were wrong who attributed so much to penitential works that they left us hardly anything of poenitentia, except some trivial satisfactions on the one hand and a...
Sloganeering: A Choose Your Own Adventure Post!
This is a Choose Your Own Adventure Post. You make it what you want! See below! Not long ago my little budding reader, six years old, noticed in a liberal relative’s home a sign full of slogans. This is the one: He read it out loud flawlessly. I was rather impressed (as was our beloved liberal relative); he had only just started performing this trick. But then, can you really call what a six-year-old does with this text “reading”? Decoding, maybe. But reading? With the likely exception of the...