Joy Davidman Lewis’s Brilliant Take-Down of Materialism
Just yesterday I was thinking, "I've just got to recover that fantastic quotation from the Joy Davidman Lewis biography I listened to on audio last year." (The downside of audio books—and the reason I typically "read" only fiction and biography in audio format—is that I can't take down quotations easily for future use.) And then today Alan Jacobs comes through for me, quoting the very thing I was wanting to recover. It's brilliant. Joy, later in life, describes the way she thought as a young,...
Review: KJV Reader’s Bible
KJV Reader's Bible, Black/Brown Tooled LeatherTouch by Anonymous My rating: 4 of 5 stars I’m being generous and hopeful with four stars; I love the idea of this KJV Reader’s Bible, and the the execution is both brilliant and deeply flawed at the same time. THE GOOD Let’s start with the good. Most importantly, this is a reader’s Bible: no chapter or verse numbers clutter the text. We get nicely paragraphed (though see “THE BAD” below), single-column text and a much smoother reading experience...
One of My Favorite Theologians Questions Me on My Decision Not to Capitalize Deity Pronouns
Posted by permission and with slight editing from both parties. Hey Mark, I just noted your upcoming column on deity pronouns. My only beef with it is that it seems to me to set up a straw man and completely ignores a stronger and more pertinent argument. I’m sure there are people who argue for capitalization on the grounds of tradition and respect; I just don’t know any (as far as I’m aware). My argument is clarity, pure and simple. That clarity extends not only to our writing about God, but...
Two of My Favorite Johns on Grammar
John Frame: In natural languages, there are many variations in grammar, style, and accent. Grammarians tend to elevate one group of variations as a standard. So the predominant speech in Berlin is considered to be “good German.” The predominant speech of Amsterdam is “good Dutch,” and so on. There may be some value in this as a means of encouraging uniformity of language in public writing and speech. But it is somewhat arbitrary. We need to remember that it comes from human grammarians, not...
Is Your Brain a Meat Machine?
Edge.org is running a fascinating series of articles asking major public figures in science, “What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known?” Prominent atheist and evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne’s answer is “Determinism.” In his words, “All matter and energy in the universe, including what’s in our brain, obey the laws of physics.” And Coyne jumps right to the significance of his viewpoint: The most important implication is that is we have no “free will”: At a given moment,...