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...
How to Think about your Political Opponents
Alan Jacobs is interviewed by his now-unbelieving former Wheaton student, Emma Green, who nonetheless provides insightful journalistic coverage of evangelicals. They discuss his new book How to Think. And Jacobs says this: Conspiracy theories tend to arise when you can’t think of any rational explanation for people believing or acting in a certain way. The more absurd you think your political or moral or spiritual opponents’ views are, the more likely you are to look for some explanation other...
Great New Book by Must-Read Christian Writer: Alan Jacobs’ How to Think
I read pretty much anything Alan Jacobs publishes. How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds was yet another great read. This book is Alan Jacobs not half-baked but maybe 90% baked, and it’s still a fantastic read. It felt to me like one long essay, very much in the Jacobs style, which means a lot of trenchant intellectual commentary, delivered smoothly, on interesting stories. But whereas Original Sin, which was very much in the same vein, felt to me like it drove me to a point and...
Tentative Thoughts on VidAngel
I am so far from telling other Christians what they should do with VidAngel. So far. I don't want to be a member of the Fraternal Order of Discernment Police. I'm just wary of my own flesh. I hate the feeling of spoiled pleasures; I love the feeling of pure ones. I'm putting this out there for your thoughts: am I overreacting?
A Bracing Conversion Story
A lesbian at Yale starts exploring Christianity (a must read): At the time, I knew two girls who were seriously dating each other. One was training to be a Lutheran minister. I wanted to know how they could reconcile their lives with Jesus and his teachings. They assured me that any appearance of conflict rested on historic misinterpretations of Scripture. They thrust a packet into my hands, and I ran back to my room to discover what the Bible really says about sexuality. The packet had a neat...