Category: Blog
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Cat in Rocket
Wheeee, I’m a cat in a rocket! I’m zooming around at high speeds, a feline making a beeline (if you will). No stopping this cat, no sir. I’m just zooming around and around and… hey, why am I zooming around? I’m just going in circles! I’m — I’m– I’m on a rocket ride at an…
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Van Morrison Wants a Danish and You Have Ringworm
I’ve got a weakness for spectacularly bad music, and I’m also a fan of Van Morrison. Normally these two passions of mine have nothing to do with each other. But once upon a time, long about 1967, young genius Van Morrison was contractually obligated to make another album for a producer he was quite finished…
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Cursed Cursive
I hate writing in cursive. When I have to write with a pen onto paper I print. The last time I wrote anything in cursive other than my signature was when I was taking the GRE to get into graduate school. The ETS testing folks mandate that you rewrite the GRE statement of honesty in…
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Pray for Ideas (George Washington Carver)
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 of it pretty fast. I know it’s sophisticated in these…
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What Books Should I Read on the Trinity? A Top Ten List
Every few months I get e-mails from people asking what books I would recommend on the Trinity. These are not requests for the latest scholarly work. They’re not focused inquiries with specific topics in mind. Nor are they requests for the greatest books of all time on the doctrine of the Trinity, the kind of…
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Council of Ephesus, 431
Theologians can say a lot about Jesus. The sub-topic within Christian theology known as christology is a big one. But from the simple faith of a new believer up through a scholar who has made christology the work of an academic lifetime, the central question is about the identity of Jesus. Who is this person?…
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Life of the Butterfly
O Butterfly, you fling yourself into the air with reckless abandon, smiling as you climb into the sky. But what’s this? A single egg drops from the mother butterfly as she flies? In reality, butterflies tend to lay between a hundred and two hundred eggs. We know this not from observation but from reliable authorities.…
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Bible Conundrums 1901
“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 began a humble little volume by Fred A. Wilson (b.…
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On Avarice and Benevolence
The Christian life is a battle between good (i.e., God) and bad (i.e., Satan). As Paul reminds us in Ephesians 6:12, “For we are not fighting against people made of flesh and blood, but against the evil rulers and authorities of the unseen world, against those mighty powers of darkness who rule this world, and…
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For St. Patrick: Two Cheers for Trinity Analogies
My life is all about teaching the doctrine of the Trinity. And everywhere I go, the first question people ask me about the Trinity is “what’s a good analogy for the Trinity?” I usually make a sour face before I can catch myself, because in my opinion, the most important things to say about the…
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Kiss and Tell
Kissing is an interesting thing. When we are young we kiss our parents, our siblings, and sometimes (often under duress) our extended family. When elementary school children discuss kissing technical language is often brought into play. A word like “cooties” (which is defined by the OED as an imaginary germ with which a socially undesirable…
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Insight Beyond the Average
“To become an artist, one must become a total person. The broader the base of general education, the more able the artist is to cope with the environment. I believe, too, that gratitude for life itself is basic to the development of insight beyond the average.” Millard Sheets (1907-1989) Quoted in Lovoos and Penney, Millard…