Is Science the Best Way to Know?
Not long ago, popular YouTube science guy Derek Muller of Veritasium put out a video detailing the myriad ways in which scientific studies go wrong. He titled it, "Is Most Published Research Wrong?" He ends with these words (click here to skip to this portion of the video): What gets me is the thought that even trying our best to figure out what’s true, using our most sophisticated and rigorous mathematical tools, peer review, and standards of practice we still get it wrong so often. So how...
Stanley Fish on the Foundations Baptist Fellowship and American Protestant Fundamentalism More Generally
Readers of my blog know that I have a strong (and perhaps strange) affinity for Stanley Fish, the pragmatic, antifoundationalist literary theorist and classic public intellectual gadfly. I find him always stimulating and incisive, even when I disagree. But because his strength is analysis and not so much evaluation (indeed, in what I'm about to quote he makes a rare statement of something he "certainly" believes in—and it just happens to be original sin!), I don't really have to disagree very...
My Room off the Hallway of Christianity
C.S. Lewis writes in his intro to his world-famous book, Mere Christianity, I hope no reader will suppose that ‘mere’ Christianity is here put forward as an alternative to the creeds of the existing communions—as if a man could adopt it in preference to Congregationalism or Greek Orthodoxy or anything else. It is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall have done what I attempted. But it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that...
Two Great Books for Two Dollars
I thoroughly enjoyed N.D. Wilson's Notes from the Tilt-A-Whirl and Death By Living. And they're $0.99 each right now on Kindle.
David Brooks on Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option, Or, The Ironist Us Vs. the Purist Them
David Brooks has responded in the New York Times to Rod Dreher’s just-out, “already-the-most-discussed-and-most-important-religious-book-of-the-decade” The Benedict Option. His response is not negative so much as graciously dismissive. He does this by labeling Dreher a “purist.” Brooks' critique sets “purists” like Dreher against “ironists” like Niebuhr (and, apparently, Brooks); and at first he had me assuming I’d land clearly in Dreher’s category, conservative Protestant that I am. But the...