My girls loved this whiny song and singer. I think this parody is better 🙂 Read more

Certainly one of the most remarkable phenomena in all of entertainment is the continued worldwide popularity of the James Bond films, despite running through numerous actors, plots, scenarios, degrees of fidelity to the original Ian Fleming novels (which I read as a teenager). And most recently of course, we now have a man, Daniel Craig, who not only looks the part more than almost all of his predecessors (some still prefer Sean Connery), but also has brought a raw, fresh,... Read more

My Mom, who lives in her home town of Wilmington N.C. often sends me newspaper clippings, and sometimes the material is blog worthy, this being such a time. Here is a picture of a man who was baptized in the Fifth Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church in Wilmington in November of 1880. The man’s name was Charles Jones Soong. This story was told because two weeks ago in that same church his great grandson, Michael Feng, a NY city financial adviser,... Read more

I’ve been saving the best part for last, namely the $46 million dollar score board, which is of course larger than any other one on the planet. By comparison, the old Texas stadium where the Cowboys used to play only cost a mere $45 million to build. Here are two shots to give you some sense of the size of the scoreboard. Let’s just hope that little thing never falls on the field when anyone is below. Among the many... Read more

There never would have been a stadium like AT+T in all likelihood, had there not been a very successful Cowboys franchise for Jerry Jones to buy. He does not own the stadium, or better said, he is a minority owner of it along with the town of Arlington Texas where it is located. If you are not overcome by the triptofan effect of turkey yet, you may remember that Tom Landry, an excellent coach, and also a devout Christian, is... Read more

It’s only appropriate at Turkey Day time that we speak of that other religion in America that is celebrated on that day— I’m referring to football of course, and the epicenter of football mania is of course Texas. Shoot, even High School ball is on TV down there with regularity. And of course it is also true that ‘everything is bigger in Texas’. Take for example the stadium you see depicted above (N.B. all these pictures are taken by your... Read more

[The following are the verbatim conclusions from John’s book,reprinted here by kind permission of Eerdmans] Chapter 18: Conclusions This book has offered a new approach to the concept of “grace,” a new analysis of Second Temple theologies of divine beneficence, and a new reading of Galatians and Romans through the lens of Paul’s theology of grace. We may summarize its distinctive contribution under five heads. 1. Grace as Gift: Since both Paul and his contemporaries used the normal vocabulary of... Read more

As we will soon realize with the coming of the mega-event— the Star Wars reboot at Christmas, it is very difficult to pull off a prequel successfully when it comes to putting real tension into the story line. Why? Because you already know what happens to the protagonists in the story when it comes to living and dying. Obviously, they live, because there are a variety of adventures already chronicled from later in the person or person’s lives. So there... Read more

panion to this one… if we are not both exhausted and if we are still game then. Blessings to you and yours, and we at Asbury hope you will come back sometime, Ben —– BEN: You decided to go out with a bang dealing with the most complicated material in all of Paul’s letters in Rom. 9-11 in your final chapter. This particular segment of Romans has been said to be the exegetes graveyard, where they go to die or... Read more

BEN: On p. 497 you discuss the synkrisis in Rom. 5.12-21. Focusing for a moment on 5.18-19 it seems to me that Paul is not merely saying that one group was considered sinners and then as a result of the grace gift, considered righteous. No, Paul wants to say more than that. He wants to say the act of Adam constituted human beings as fallen creatures, sinners, inherently so. And the grace gift, by contrast constitutes people as righteous, or... Read more