Featured Essay / Culture
A friend and I had a conversation about a situation of systemic and personal abuse she was suffering, which turned into correspondence between us. With permission, I have polished up my exchange with Lori (a pseudonym), as a reflection on what it means for a victim to properly love a…
Essay / Culture
For years Rod Dreher (senior editor at The American Conservative) has been writing about his “Benedict Option.” Now his book of the same title has finally appeared. To be honest, I have not been convinced by his articles addressing the Benedict Option and his book
Essay / Theology
The new issue of the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society is out, and it’s got plenty of Trinitarian theology in it. Don’t miss Scott Swain’s article on the Bible and the Trinity, and Gerald McDermott’s piece on the Trinity and world religions. It’s also
Essay / Theology
I just came across this fascinating chart by T. Grashop. It’s printed in the front of the Geneva Bible, and it diagrams, using a tree of subdivisions, the way to read the Bible. There are seven steps, and they start as far back as “earnestly…pray
Essay / Theology
My 2010 book The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything, is coming out in a second edition in April 2017. Why? Because while the first edition has found a home in classrooms as well as churches, it contained a few obstacles that
Essay / Theology
Scott Swain and I recently turned in the manuscript for a book called Retrieving Eternal Generation. It’s a collection of fifteen essays that we hope will go a long way toward securing Trinitarian theology’s classic form for contemporary theological work. The last few decades have
Essay / Theology
Robert Sokolowski has said that The Christian God is presented as being so transcendent to the world that he could be, in undiminished goodness and greatness, even if the world were not. The Christian God can be distinguished from the world in this radical way.
Essay / Theology
Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923) was an influential German theologian, whose life project was to work out the logic of the historical sciences in the sphere of Christianity and culture. In his own theological work, he did not think that a thorough historicism would leave any room
Essay / Theology
Does God have emotions? Anybody who reads the Bible certainly finds God declaring himself to be full of love, full of anger, and many other things besides. So the answer seems obvious: Emotional God. But as soon as you say it, it sounds odd and
Essay / Theology
The release date for the movie version of The Shack was March 3. That morning (not having seen the film yet) I was the guest in Biola’s interview-format chapel session called The Biola Hour (the name is a callback to the school’s great radio heritage).
Essay / Education
File this under “weird books I have encountered.” Erasmus Addlepate’s 1940 How to Read Two Books: It’s obviously a spoof of Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book. You can tell from Addlepate’s supposed other books like How to Get Up int he Morning that
Essay / Education
In his 1961 book An Experiment in Criticism, C.S. Lewis describes the difference between reading a book to encounter what is in it, and using a book for other reasons. There are lots of other reasons to use a book, some petty and some profound,
Essay / Theology
Late in 2016 I wrote a blog post on divine simplicity for the Pro-Nicene Theology series at Zondervan Academics’ Common Places blog (now available as part of a free mini-e-book). My goal was to show the biblical support for the doctrine of divine simplicity (simplicity was