Alone in the New America
This article describes the working-class demographic quite literally surrounding my church (with one notable exception, a gated community on the north side). The article offers an accurate diagnosis of their woes—through terribly sad anecdotes—and then an insufficient prescription. The broken families in West Greenville (and particularly the children) would be helped by structural improvements in society, but I've sat on their porches and talked to them. I've preached to them over and over in...
RACHE
It's not a very satisfying revenge, but an authoritative proofer nixed my favorite phrase in a little paragraph I just wrote for my current project at BJU Press, one focused on biblical worldview and the CFR metanarrative. This phrase must see the light of day—or, well..., the murky light of an obscure blog! See if you can guess which phrase it was... You can only know a pole is bent if you have some idea of what it looked like when it was straight. And that’s why the Creation, Fall,...
Review: Art and Music: A Student’s Guide
Art and Music: A Student's Guide by Paul Munson My rating: 4 of 5 stars This was really an excellent little book. Accessible, perceptive, engaging, and rooted in that Christian intellectual tradition this little Crossway series is aiming to reclaim. It loses one star on a technicality: if we're really reclaiming an intellectual tradition, I think we should get a little more hint—in the footnotes, at the very least—that the discussion is in fact tied to that tradition. The authors claim...
Grandiloquence and the KJV
I have long felt that this was the case, and it's nice to have it confirmed by someone with an ear for Hebrew as well developed as that of Robert Alter (scroll down to find his presentation), who's been reading the language since boyhood: Poetry in the King James Version….reads magnificently as English verse… Eloquence seems the proper attribute for these renderings of ancient Hebrew poetry. Yet…the eloquence is more Jacobean…than biblical: orotund, expansive, at times exhibiting a relish in...
Homosexuality and Worldview
I've spent the last year and a half immersed in understanding the Christian worldview and explaining it to twelfth graders. The last few days I've done a lot of writing on homosexuality (after many years of reading on the topic in articles and books), and I just came across this quote in a review of Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior is Changing Everything. I believe this is profoundly true, and an extremely important insight: At bottom in the debate over same-sex...