Jennifer Lawrence, our home girl from Louisville, apparently can do no wrong. She is being given one interesting role after another, and not coincidentally she is on a roll. The girl can flat act. The movie ‘Joy’ is in fact a true story about one Joy Mangano who invented the Miracle Mop among other things. The story however is one of overcoming incredible adversity mostly caused by her hugely dysfunctional family. Granted that no family is perfect, and granted that... Read more

The second ‘true story’ film you may have missed during the holidays which is well worth the watch is ‘Concussion’. Will Smith gives an Oscar worthy performance, really the best performance of his life as a Nigerian doctor living in Pittsburgh who discovers CTE– the brain disease caused by repeated head trauma. Like ‘the Big Short’ this movie is an expose film, telling the true story that the NFL tried to bury, cover up, and deny, namely that the violent... Read more

The Christmas season has come and gone, and since we are now officially in the movie dead zone, I thought I would recommend to you several excellent movies that came out during the Holiday season but which you may have missed due to the Star Wars blitz. The first of these involves an all star cast (Pitt, Gosling, Carell, Tomei, and Bale, among others) and a creative technique to the story telling (e.g. sometimes the cast goes out of character... Read more

Caveat Emptor, or in this case Caveat Lector. I should have known better. There were some negative reviews of this first Flavia Albia detective story. One reviewer on Amazon complained that the writing didn’t seem like the writing of Lindsey Davis. Balogna and I don’t mean the city named that in Italia!! The writing in this novel is good, and displays the same style and wit as her other earlier novels. Another writer complained that Flavia Albia is portrayed as... Read more

One of the more important issues in regard to personalia in the NT, is who exactly was this Erastos mentioned in Rom. 16.23 and what was his job. He appears to be a convert to the new faith, presumably via Paul, and he lives in Corinth or one of its seaports, where Paul is currently residing. He is probably the same person mentioned in the famous inscription ‘Erastus pro aedilite S.V. stravit’ found in front of the stadium in Corinth... Read more

There is a difference between a sermon, on the one hand, and a lecture or essay on the other. A sermon is not simply a public address on a religious subject; it is not simply an exposition of a passage of Scripture. It is these things, yet if really is a sermon and not a lecture, it is something else too. It is a means by which God himself speaks to us. This is not an event the preacher can... Read more

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Here is an excellent recent post by my friend Larry Hurtado which deserves a further hearing. He is not enamored of the ‘history revisionists’ and neither am I when it comes to early Christian history. by larryhurtado A recent article mounts a “full-on” challenge to the widely-accepted report of a Neronian pogrom against Christians in Rome in 64 AD, after the fire that destroyed a goodly part of Rome: Brent D. Shaw, “The Myth of the Neronian Persecution,” Journal of... Read more

We are now in the season of Christmas for the Orthodox Church, and so it will be appropriate to have some reflections on the events surrounding Jesus’ birth, somewhere around 4 B.C. or a bit before. Here is a helpful column by my friend Philip Jenkins for your perusal…. The Year Jesus Was Born December 11, 2015 by Philip Jenkins 5 Comments Scholars differ on the exact birthdate of Jesus of Nazareth, though a fair consensus holds that it was... Read more

By now, most folk will know that Howard Marshall has gone to be with the Lord a month ago. The following is a lecture by I.H. Marshall given at Acadia University where I taught last summer on hermeneutics or the art of Biblical Interpretation. Howard was a good friend of mine,and like myself, an Evangelical Methodist. At one point he asked me if I would consider applying for the post he was retiring from at Aberdeen. I told him my... Read more