I’m thinking you might like to know what I think of student evaluations, not because such a question came to your mind in some random moment but because of the title to this post. What I think has been said better by Joseph Epstein, in A Literary Education (p. 351): Student evaluations, set in place to give the impression to students that they have an important say in their own education, are of the useless intrusions into university teaching by... Read more
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The third chapter of J. Richard Middleton’s book The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1 concluded that the Mesopotamian cultural context had the dominant influence on the early chapters of Genesis and on the meaning of the image of God in Genesis 1 and that Genesis 1:26-27 represents an intentional democratization of the idea that kings and rulers were images of gods. In the fourth chapter Middleton explores the Mesopotamian cultural matrix in which this idea was developed.... Read more
When I was a young girl, I dreamed of being a writer. More specifically, I wanted to be a poet. As evidence of this desire, my mother still has a treasure trove of cards with endearingly unpolished poems written in them by an aspiring writer. I entered a Young Author’s Contest in elementary school with A Collection of Monthly Verses. When I won a plaque and a balloon for that collection, I fancied myself a true poet. Two of my... Read more
Source: The next Olympics to be awarded, a little more than a year from now, will be the 2022 Winter Games. Rather than going to the strongest bid, the games may end up going to the last city standing—a long list of potential hosts have given up on their Olympic dreams because the whole thing is one huge, useless waste of money. Yesterday, Krakow, Poland, officially withdrew its bid for the games, a day after a citywide referendum where 70 percent of voters... Read more
A few weeks ago, I spoke at an interdenominational event called the Festival of Young Preachers. It was an event for young adults across the region interested in preaching. It was fascinating to see so many different people from different traditions trying to help younger people catch a vision for what this calling is, and why it matters. Over the past few years, one of the surprising trends has been watching seminaries across the country slowly start to lose incoming... Read more
My friend, Bob Robinson, has made a good case for seeing the New Calvinists as Neo-Puritans. I don’t think we can know this for sure, but it is indeed possible that on this blog that group was first called the Neo-Reformed, but a commenter said they are not really Reformed since they are mostly Baptists and not officially connected with the Reformed denominations. Then another friend said you can’t call them Neo-Calvinists since that’s Kuyper. Neo-Puritan is a good moniker, but... Read more
Anneli Rufus: Is low self-esteem all that bad? Self-loathing is. But between self-loathing and narcissism is a vast spectrum comprising infinitely various degrees of self-regard. Neither extreme is good. If only we could just reach medium. In 1986, California state assembly member John Vasconcellos proposed the State Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem. This ignited a new movement: Based on the notion that low self-esteem caused every kind of social woe from teenage pregnancy to low test scores and high dropout... Read more
Last Tuesday I put up a summary (No Historical Adam?) of Denis Lamoureux’s chapter in the new book from the Zondervan Counterpoints series: Four Views on the Historical Adam. Denis presents a view that we should recognize the Adam story as an accommodation to an ancient Near Eastern understanding of human origins. In today’s post we will look at the responses offered by the other three contributors, John Walton, Jack Collins, and William Barrick, and at the rejoinder offered by Denis... Read more
The Book of Revelation (or, The Apocalypse) cannot be brought up as a subject without my returning to the fervor of its interpreters in the world of my young adulthood, and that means — not to put too fine of a point on it — Hal Lindsey or Salem Kirban, both of whom wrote (and made gobs of money off of) imaginative speculations of what the tribulation would be like. In fact, I grew up in the generation that was... Read more
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