Review: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath My rating: 3 of 5 stars I purposefully let this book marinate in my mind for a week or so after I completed it before sitting down to write the review. I wanted to see what stuck. For me, it was the idea that my communication needs to be simple (find the central idea) and concrete (like a story) in order to stick. The SUCCESs acronym didn't fully stick, so I had to look it up again to confirm what it was: Simple, Unexpected,...
Love Does Not Equal Tolerance of Whatever You Want to Do: A Prooftext
I like it when people think clearly enough to advert to their epistemological controls, their critical foundations. I think it's a rare gift in a world in which most educated people seem to hold tightly to moral relativism and scientistic absolutism at the same time, but fail ever to look down at what they're standing on. So when I got to the end of pro-gay biblical scholar and Yale religious studies professor Dale Martin's essay arguing that ἀρσενοκοίτης (arsenokoites) in 1 Cor 6 and 1 Tim 1...
Psalm 44 and the Prosperity Gospel
Prosperity preachers know just what to do with the first part of Psalm 44. They even get it kind of right: God is gracious to us and saves us and allows us to boast in him continually. But the prosperity movement doesn’t have a category for inexplicable divine rejection and undeserved, intractable public disgrace—the theme of the second half of the song. Kate Bowler in Blessed: a History of the American Prosperity Gospel, describes the sad story of an elderly woman who had long been faithful...
Review: Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana – Medical, Recreational and Scientific
Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana - Medical, Recreational and Scientific by Martin A. Lee My rating: 2 of 5 stars Indefatigable. Argument by avalanche. That's the method here. Story after anecdote after study after reason why cannabis should not only be legalized but recognized for the panacea that it is. But Martin Lee's journalistic style doesn't sound like something coming from a crackpot (or a pothead). If there isn't much life, or any humor whatsoever, in his dogged prose,...
Good Interview about Bible Clutter
Interesting: Tony Reinke talks to Glenn Pauw of Biblica about my Bible Typography Manifesto. Well, okay, they never mention it by name, but you can tell it's what they have in mind... Do give it a read. It's so funny to me that ideas like these come in waves. Why didn't anyone say this stuff in 1976? Or 1946? Or did they? I did find a reader's edition of the KJV NT from the 1930s once. So someone else in the history of the church thought about "Bible clutter" at some point. I guess modernism...