The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? by Michael J. SandelMy rating: 5 of 5 starsI loved Sandel's book Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? His power is incisive analysis: he cuts to the Augustinian heart of divisive issues using classic...
The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution by Carl R. Trueman.My rating: 5 of 5 stars I'm hoping to publish in a journal a more extensive review of this excellent—though long and at times...
This video on “white supremacy” in Western music theory recently got some attention from intelligent friends and acquaintances. It claims that Western music theory is racist—white supremacist, to be precise—for teaching only the musical style of 18th century European...
There’s a young man I know from Christian circles somewhere in the U.S.—I’ll call him Kyle or Gerald or Edward, or maybe something a little more derogatory—who posted what I can only call an anti-girls-going-to-college meme on Facebook. It argued that Christian...
Bavinck: A Critical Biography My rating: 5 of 5 starsHerman Bavinck's fame as a theologian has been steadily growing in my circles—especially since the Dutch Translation Society began putting out his Reformed Dogmatics in English in 2003. All four volumes sit proudly...
An ex-evangelical acquaintance of mine recently posted a link to an academic journal article critiquing inerrantist biblical scholars. It contained this paragraph: Well, turnabout is fair play, especially with insufferably tendentious arguments. (I'm sorry: I believe...
A brand new book I wrote this past year, Basics for a Biblical Worldview has just been released. It's a sixth grade biblical worldview textbook for BJU Press. For this project I was privileged to rejoin as a freelancer the team I was on at BJU Press for nine years,...
A Christian friend who struggles with doubt recently wrote me asking why I chose the name of long-time blog, byfaithweunderstand.com. Today I was thinking again about those four words “by faith we understand” and I feel a physical reaction to it. It’s hard to swallow...
J.I. Packer’s first book, “Fundamentalism” and the Word of God, published when he was 32 years old in 1958, provides a brilliantly simple analysis of the three major approaches to Christian religious authority that were then, as now, on offer. Briefly, they were…. 1)...
One of my walking buddies at work is a statistician who does data analysis for our company. Of statistics, I guess. I always enjoy talking to him; I like the way his mind works. I’ve long been interested in epistemology, the question of how we know—how we justify our...
From the difficult-to-watch documentary (available on Netflix), One Child Nation. So profoundly sad and sobering. For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They...
I’ve become a counselor for a number of young men who have realized that they can no longer in good conscience remain tied to King James Only institutions. Almost without exception, the ones who have reached out to me have shown genuine graciousness and gratitude...