A friend of mine is something of a seeker, entertaining and exploring Christian faith and often apparently inhabiting it—but still struggling in a move from darkness to light. That’s the best way I know how to describe him. He wrote me an eloquent letter in which he...
Free speech issues have made the news recently as political tensions rise—along with distrust in and fatigue with social media. No one has helped me understand the issues at stake better than Stanley Fish. His Winning Arguments is very helpful, and this article from...
When I first heard the story below, about a New York City public school, I didn’t believe it. It seemed too convenient, like something concocted for a fundraising letter. My wife had the same reaction. I read the whole piece to assure myself of the reliability of the...
Rcently, against my better judgment and somewhat by accident, I became involved in today’s predominant form of public discourse: an online discussion with strangers. I found myself the lone defender of the fairly straightforward idea (it seemed to me at the time) that...
My company offers incentives to employees every year to read business books. By this means I have gotten through some self-helpy stuff I admit I would have disdained otherwise. To be honest, I feel icky when I read books that purport to lead you to a successful life...
Spurgeon quotes one “Dr. M’Cosh” in The Treasury of David, and he has eloquent and insightful things to say, centuries ago, about the war between science and religion, reason and faith: We have often mourned over the attempts made to set the works of God against the...
I just got back from a seven-day trip down two thirds of the Grand Canyon with Canyon Ministries, William D. Barrick, Terry Mortenson, and (especially) knowledgeable Cedarville University geologist John Whitmore. I gained a much deeper understanding of the geology of...
I read pretty much everything Alan Jacobs writes. This piece is at the top of the list of must-reads. It’s his assessment of the major storm between two conservatives: Sohrab Ahmari and David French. Let me try to spin Jacobs’ basic argument into the way I would put...
What first attracted me to Rebecca McLaughlin’s Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World’s Largest Religion was the title. I actually assumed it was a non-Christian book. Second was the author: I read a piece of hers on TGC that I liked. Third, to be...
Theodore Gioia in the L.A. Review of Books: In the mass-media era, the general public primarily experiences classical music through detached snippets of larger pieces extracted to lend their symbolic power to a commercial agenda. Artists and advertisers dissect...
Ember Rising by S.D. Smith My rating: 5 of 5 stars Loved it. So did the kids. (And the illustrations, by my respected friend Zach Franzen, were also excellent.) For a good while I was thinking that this book is The Benedict Option for kids—and for adults who dutifully...
My heart goes out to Tara Westover. I rooted for her and felt defensive for her during 100% of the story. Other people’s epistemological sins harmed her. Precisely because of her love for her parents, those sins maintained a hold on her far, far into a life that, on...