Featured Essay / Art
There's a little song called God Went Bowling by a band called the Swirling Eddies. It was on their 1994 album Zoom Daddy, and it features an oompah beat driven by accordion. Over it all is the snide vocal of Terry Scott Taylor, the songwriter whose mad genius has found…
Essay / Art
I sometimes promote myself as the “world’s greatest systematic theologian cartoonist,” because it’s a pretty safe boast. If I ever meet another professional theologian who’s also a published cartoonist, I’ll have to adjust my bragging to something like “one of the two greatest.” But while
Essay / Literature
Today in 1678 John Bunyan brought out the first version of the Pilgrim’s Progress. He did make some revisions after that first edition, but the book was recognizably itself as soon as it was published. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, famously sophisticated, called this simple book “incomparably
Essay / Art
Nuns fret not at their Convent’s narrow room; And Hermits are contented with their Cells; And Students with their pensive Citadels: Maids at the Wheel, the Weaver at his Loom, Sit blithe and happy; Bees that soar for bloom, High as the highest Peak of
Essay / Literature
Hannah More was a wildly popular author in her day because she had the common touch and a style that perfectly suited the tastes of her time. Here is one of her doctrinal poems (from volume 5 of her collected works), in which she carries
Essay / Literature
The Kids-Book Author: Have you read the Shack of Mack? Have you read this paperback? Would you give it to your friends? Will you spoil how it ends? I have read the Shack of Mack. I have read this paperback. I would not give it
Essay / Literature
Today in 1572, John Donne was born. Donne was equally powerful as a poet and as a preacher, because in both roles he exercised an apparently absolute mastery over the English language. In his 1999 book The Theology of John Donne, Jeffrey Johnson argues that
Essay / Literature
First: A classic early poem by William Wordsworth. Then: Four visual analyses of the evidence. We Are Seven A little child, dear brother Jem, That lightly draws its breath, And feels its life in every limb, What should it know of death? I met a
Essay / Literature
A selection from W. H. Auden, ‘The Poet & The City’, in The Dyer’s Hand and other essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 86-87 …to speak sense into politics. ‘There are two kinds of political issues, Party issues and Revolutionary issues. In a party issue,
Essay / Education
A few years ago, I taught the Chronicles of Narnia as part of a college course. I always feel odd teaching a class on books that people read for fun, books with a very high entertainment value. Isn’t that what people outside the academy assume
Essay / Literature
The ESV Study Bible is soon to be released, and from the plentiful pre-release materials that I’ve seen online, this promises to be a great resource. The editors seem to have crammed a lot of helpful things into a single volume, including background info, maps
Essay / Literature
Like her biblical namesake, the Ruth of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (1980) is a sojourner among strangers. The almost misleading title of the novel suggests that the novel will be concerned with the daily habits that constitute and stabilize domestic life. Instead, the novel’s protagonists inhabit
Essay / Literature
RVDELY thou wrongest my deare harts desire, In finding fault with her too portly pride: the thing which I doo most in her admire, is of the world vnworthy most enuide. For in those lofty lookes is close implide, scorn of base things, & sdeigne