Review: Black Boy by Richard Wright
Black Boy by Richard Wright My rating: 4 of 5 stars Stirring, insightful, and beautiful. So many memorable and powerful vignettes. I do see why the Book of the Month Club dropped the second part, but I was glad to read it, too. I did keep feeling as if Wright portrayed himself in a somewhat more favorable light than was truly just—though it's difficult to blame someone who suffered so much for so long, and from such a tender age. I did sometimes wonder if the apparent deadness of other...
Ting Vs Charge for Cell Service
I like Ting a lot. The pricing model is well conceived, and the resultant costs are low. The customer service is fantastic. The website and mobile apps function flawlessly. I never get unexpected charges. Laura and I have been on it for three years, and our average monthly bill for talk, text, and (about a gig of) data on two smartphones was $54.01 (we bought the phones separately). Laura's staying on Ting, but I just moved to Charge (use this referral code and we both get a free gig of data:...
Dr Mark Ward Jr on Sermon Audio
It took me 35 years and a terminal degree, but a sermon of mine finally made it onto SermonAudio.com. In God's providence, I simply have not had much opportunity to preach to adult Christians (I've preached several hundred evangelistic messages). It was a genuine thrill to herald the Great Commandments to a precious body of believers in Edmonton, Alberta. (By the way, I did not supply the title to this message, but it's pretty good.)
Working Class People and the Evangelical Conversation
There are other major, often unreached for the Gospel demographics that are maybe not as prestigious but no less spiritually important and in some cases far more numerous. A gun-owning middle aged white man in West Virginia or central Pennsylvania who’s a truck driver or living on disability is not a major part of the Evangelical conversation. A near retirement age housewife who works part-time at Wal-Mart in a small Midwestern city is typically not part of the conversation. A Millennial age...
I’m with Pinker
I critiqued Steven Pinker several times in Biblical Worldview: Creation, Fall, Redemption; Pinker is an epistemological extremist, in my unaccredited opinion, someone who places far too much faith in empirical method. But I can't help but like the guy when he talks about the English language—and when he talks: he's got a precise, Canadian-inflected way of speaking that I like. (I would like him better if he let me on the AHD usage panel, but ah well...) And he understands that the "rules" of...