The Case for Grace is the best book Lee Strobel has written and that is praising it without damning anything else he has written. Strobel is a journalist and the argument he makes in The Case for Grace is better suited to his talents than any of his other (excellent) books. Strobel is telling readers of the transformative power of the Christian message. Yesterday I acknowledged that Christianity does not make bad men perfect, but Strobel shows that Christianity can make bad men... Read more

Christians have made a great deal of history. If you name Christ, we have to claim you since God alone knows the status of your soul and so we are responsible for you. Tomorrow I will review a book on the transformative power of God’s grace The Case for Grace by my colleague Lee Strobel. Today I will review a book that challenges Faith: An Account of the Things of Yucatan by Fray Diego de Landa. The friar who wrote this book... Read more

Feeling sad? There are two sure fire drugs in our household against sorrow: Sherlock Holmes audiobooks read by Charlton Griffen and Prince Valiant comics. Leaving aside for another day the perfect voice acting of Griffen, let me praise the artistry of Hal Foster, artist, story teller, maker of jolliness.  Do not confuse him with Hal Foster the art critic, a killer of jolliness. Hal Foster’s most famous work, the comic “strip” Prince Valiant still exists even in the pages of the... Read more

Today is Hope’s birthday . . . not the virtue, which has been with us since God had a thought about us, but the woman: Hope Elizabeth Lancy Reynolds. She does not like it when I make private praise public, so let me stop the sappiness and merely wish her a wonderful day, turning instead to praise of the virtue for which her mother and father named her fifty-one years ago. Hope is what I need today and every day. The... Read more

The Copts are not in communion with mainstream Christian churches (Protestant, Orthodox, and Catholic). Historically, Coptic leaders had some deficient ideas about the nature of Christ. Maybe. Decades of ecumenical dialogue have done much to heal the wounds of this important division and the actual state of the division is beyond my ability to describe. The  division between the Copts and the rest of Christendom is not yet (officially) healed but progress is being made.     Make no mistake: getting... Read more

Lord Byron was the hot, trendy poet who could afford to mock poor William Wordsworth and his Lake Country set. Byron was young, splendid, and “naughty.” Like Bill Clinton, Byron knew how to stage a scandal that hurt everybody but Byron. Wordsworth was not dashing, more diffident, laboring away on the preface of a great poem he would never finish. Byron took birth and money as his natural due while poor Wordsworth had to work to eat. And yet of... Read more

Known of God, loved by God, alive in God: Thy Martyrs, O Lord, in their courageous contest for Thee received as the prize the crowns of incorruption and life from Thee, our immortal God. For since they possessed Thy strength, they cast down the tyrants and wholly destroyed the demons’ strengthless presumption. Thy martyrs Martyrs make their deaths about Him and Jesus never forgets His beloved. Their cause is now His cause. Their pain is now His pain. Their cries... Read more

My wise mother says as a boy I viewed all problems as easily solvable. “All you gotta do,” I would say to her and then make the complicated overly simple. The solutions were not even always wrong, just ignorant of the unintended consequences of the change.  Mom taught me that solutions are often worse than the problem. This did not make sense to me. Was Mom saying we should be slow (like Ents?) or ignore our problems? Of course, she was not so... Read more