The glory of God is a human fully alive,” so said Irenaeus, and this line is both quoted and a theme for Trevor Hudson’s new book, Discovering Our Spiritual Identity: Practices for God’s Beloved. Signpost #7: The “acid test” of spirituality is compassion and love of God and of others — and it begins at home. [For an assessment of how we love, see the post immediately below this post.] How do you measure the “acid test” in spirituality? Have... Read more
The following test is designed to work with my book, The Jesus Creed: Loving God, Loving Others. I am a bit of an assessment nut, so the test actually measures the degree to which readers begin to conform to what is written in the Jesus Creed (and the Companion Guide). I make no pretense that this does it all, or that it perfectly measures spiritual formation, but it is a start. [The Jesus Creed project has two books: the original... Read more
A new edition of Mark Twain’s classic will revise the N-word and not use “Injun” — what do you think? To do or not to do? Another one: Which edition would you want your children to read? From Keith Staskiewicz: What is a word worth? According to Publishers Weekly, NewSouth Books’ upcoming edition of Mark Twain’s seminal novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will remove all instances of the “n” word—I’ll give you a hint, it’s not nonesuch—present in the text and replace it... Read more
Mario Rizzo, in an editorial at CSM, weighs in on the Palin vs. Michelle Obama spat about what foods to eat. Rizzo makes an important point about what distinguishes the political conservative from the classical liberal. Having just read a study of Thomas Paine, who was in important ways the architect for the modern world’s view of human rights, I think Rizzo gets it. And yet not even this is the main point. The advice comes from a person who... Read more
We’ve been working through Denis O. Lamoureux’s book Evolutionary Creation: A Christian Approach to Evolution – a book that describes a way to move beyond the creation and evolutions debates. Chapter 7 provides Dr. Lamoureux’s vision of the means to move beyond conflict and concordance. His approach hinges on the Message Incident Principle separating the divinely inspired message from the incidental features of the text arising from the context of the day and age when it was produced. This is... Read more
In one of my classes a student, one who had grown up in suburban evangelicalism and who was developing some critical thinking skills, after reading Joshua, said, “There is no way God did what the writer of Joshua says God did.” Another student, who had grown up in a tougher world evidently, said, “God is God and he can do whatever the hell he wants!” That’s a quote. I find those two responses to tough passages in the Bible typical:... Read more
From Sarah Weinman: Borders (BGP), the country’s second-largest book retailer, had been counting on a Christmas miracle to rescue it from deep financial doldrums. But the holiday season played Scrooge instead. Now, the liquidity shortfall Borders warned might happen — and a possible bankruptcy it didn’t need to warn worried investors about — seems ever more certain in 2011. See full article from DailyFinance:http://srph.it/fGeRNT Read more
Andy Crouch has a fascinating list of ten cultural trends of the last decade, and I swipe only the first one here. From Q’s site: Indeed, when I reflect on the most significant developments of the never-adequately-named 2000s (the aughts? the aughties? the naughties?), it seems that almost all of them were well under way in 1999, or even 1989. At the same time, in the last ten years some long-wave trends accelerated in notable ways. Acceleration matters. In one... Read more
How odd to end the year thinking about eschatology! The issue today for many of us is the power and the pervasiveness of the Left Behind approach to reading Revelation. The method is so pervasive many today just don’t even want to talk about this stuff. Many raise their hands and walk away — choosing to spend their energies on other topics. Well, I wish we could create a logjam and force the entire issue to be reconsidered. What would... Read more
This post is from our friend in Dublin, Patrick Mitchel. Patrick blogs at Faith in Ireland, and he is a professor at Irish Bible Institute, in the heart of Dublin. Kris and I had the joy of meeting Patrick and the privilege of lecturing at IBI last summer. Thanks Patrick for your gospel work in Dublin. (By the way, this post and the one below it form a nice pair for our day.) From Patrick… I’ve been thinking a bit... Read more
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Jesus Creed
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