In 1921, the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (later Biola College, now Biola University) published a story in its magazine The King’s Business, entitled “A Day in a Bible Institute.”    The editors wanted to describe for their readers a typical day at the downtown

When J. R. R. Tolkien was a student at Oxford, he found that one of his classmates (Allen Barnett) was from the state of Kentucky, and that this classmate had a lot of good stories about how Kentucky folk talk, behave, and live. Tolkien pumped

Perhaps you have heard about the movie/documentary that was recently in limited release in the United States entitled Die Große Stille, translated into English as Into Great Silence. The movie by German filmmaker Phillip Gröning was “in the works” for about twenty-one years before its

My wife just read a biography of George Washington Carver (subtitled The Man Who Overcame, by Lawrence Elliot (Prentice-Hall, 1966). Like most biographies of Carver, this one is out to edify and inspire the reader at all costs, and the lessons do come flying out

“This little book makes few pretensions which give it a claim upon the attention of a wise and busy world.” If that’s the kind of first sentence that makes you set a book aside, O wise and busy reader, then click away now. But so

What’s remarkable about The Brothers Karamazov is the way Dostoyevsky put truly dangerous stuff into the book. He was trying to write a book that would help people, help a civilization. Dostoyevsky seems to have thought of his vocation as somewhat prophetic, and he trained

F. B. Meyer (1847 — 1929) was a well-known Baptist pastor back around the turn of the twentieth century, but less famous today. Like so many of the great evangelicals of a hundred years ago, he combined in his life things that we have sadly

“The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese,” quipped G. K. Chesterton circa 1910. But Chesterton lied. For by that time, James McIntyre (1827-1906), The Cheese Poet, had already lived an entire artistic career devoted to turophilia, the love of cheese. I

In a 1998 article in Pro Ecclesia, Richard J. Mouw undertook a defense of “Evangelism: The Very Idea!” (Pro Ecclesia VII.2 (1998), 172-185). He begins by saying, “It has never been difficult to find people who take offense at the very idea of evangelism. The

Last weekend was Purim on the Jewish calendar, and while I’m way too goy to have a real megillah, I did open my Bible and read the book of Esther. Down through the ages, Esther hasn’t drawn a lot of attention from Christian commentators, but