Well, I finally did it. I bought a harness for Gloria the cat on Amazon. It should arrive on Friday if the gods of the moment smile kindly upon me. Then I’ll stuff her circular shape into it and see if she wouldn’t like to wander around in the garden. And also bundle her into the car and go to my mother’s house. Yesterday we hauled her along there in her box and she had a nice quiet hour basking... Read more
Backed up as I am on all the different kinds of reading, I was surprised to find myself yesterday collapse back and fly through Mike Duran’s memoir, disciple-ish: My Unconventional Pilgrimage through Faith, Art, and Evangelical Culture. I haven’t read a whole book in an afternoon for a long time. Mostly I am too distracted and so many people try to talk to me. But everyone, for whatever reason, had their own stuff going on, and so I read and... Read more
It is a gray, chilly day here in Bing. To console ourselves we’ve done a terribly long podcast talking about some of the many problems in the newly released Making of Biblical Womanhood. We talk about inerrancy, translation issues, the Caananite woman, how Jesus interprets the Scriptures, and why all of this matters. I’m sure it is all you would expect it to be. Hope it makes your Monday sunnier than mine! On account of all our travels, I really... Read more
I’m at Stand Firm this morning. On our quick trip there and back again, Matt and I took a whole day in the car to listen to a book released just this last week—The Making of Biblical Womanhood by Beth Allison Barr. Then, even though we were in the car, we watched the launch zoom with Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Barr, and Scott McKnight. I’m going to be writing a review of the book post haste, and, indeed, there was so... Read more
Jesus excited to see what happens to him in the Book of Longings. Sorry to have fallen off the podcast routine! We are not at home this week and blithely thought we would be able to record wherever we were and upload it, but that turned out not to be true. We are too technologically challenged to figure it out. That also means the sermon and everything will be along later. Sorry to have ruined everything for the people who... Read more
I’m over at Stand Firm today. After attending yet another funeral in the morning yesterday, I came home and hunched over my kitchen counter, absorbed in leftover scalloped potatoes, to be transported by the soaring music, the elegant hats, and the heartbreaking social distancing of a very different kind of burial, that of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. A handful of people—the queen herself alone, sitting far distant even from her family—sat in the perfect stillness of mourning, heads bowed.... Read more
Is it Friday? I guess that means some takes. One Beth Allison Barr was interviewed by NPR about her forthcoming book on “Biblical” Womanhood. If the interview is any indication–and why wouldn’t it because it’s her talking about her own book–then what we have is something perhaps as fatuous as the Jesus Seminar of bygone years, whereby Jesus is made into a middle-class American. Anyway, Barr says this at the end of the interview: Conservative evangelicalism has been teaching women... Read more
I have an immense treat for you this morning. I happen to have a very clever friend who recently had an email exchange that she’s given me permission to put here–anonymously of course–in illustration of the great big cultural shift that’s going on right now, between what Carl Trueman calls the First/Second Worlds with the new overpowering Third World. These terms don’t refer to the kind of technological development or industry that a country enjoys, but rather the assumptions that people... Read more
Me contemplating change of any kind. After not doing anything very exciting for a whole year except for marking one death after another, we’re doing a hundred things all at once. Yesterday morning a clever and knowledgeable person ripped apart our attic bathroom, knowing there was some kind of interesting issues unseen behind the wall, and sure enough, there was evidence of a long-ago fire, and lots and lots of water damage from an inadequately repaired roof. According to the... Read more
I have writer’s block. Not because I can’t think of anything to say, but because I’m in that awful world where I have a lot of stuff I could write about–interesting stuff, I think–but for a variety of reasons, I don’t want to put any of it online. Or not much of it. Also, I am slowly working through Carl Trueman’s book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, in tandem with Cynical Theories. It’s taking me forever because... Read more
Preventing Grace
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