The First Thing I spent a few minutes following links about Matthew Paul Turner and his very recent news. He is a writer of very popular children’s books. Here is a description of a recent one: A mother with wide, emerald eyes cradles her blanketed infant: “from the moment I saw you,/ I started to pray./ Big prayers and small ones/ I have sent God’s way.” As the child grows from a baby to a girl, the mother is encouraging... Read more
Well, is it Monday? I guess it is. We had a busy weekend and woke up late and tried to pull ourselves together to talk about what makes someone a Christian, how not to lie about your feelings but also how not to follow your heart, how to use the category of “enemy” to stop shunning and canceling people, and how I will now go read books by J.I. Packer, oh, and how much I’m loving that new translation of... Read more
I see that #JesusMatters is trending on Twitter this morning, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t mean what I wish it would mean and I’m afraid to scroll around to find out. These are linguistically strange times. Instead of that, I want to think about something nicer—this song. You may have seen varieties of it floating around the internet. The first one I saw was at the very beginning of covid, done by a group of churches in the UK.... Read more
If you have to homeschool this year, I recommend purchasing a large stuffed duck. It’s Friday. It really really is. One Matt wrote a piece for the print edition of the Christian Research Journal, which means that you have to pay real money to read it (which you should totally do) and then did a podcast with Melanie Cogdill. I listened to it this week with one eye lazily going over this piece—Andy Stanley explaining why he can’t hold real... Read more
I’m rushing along, but paused for a few minutes to say what I thought about that weird poster going around Twitter about what constitutes “whiteness,” along with saying some things about John McWhorter’s review of White Fragility in the Atlantic. It’s pretty short so there you are. Have a great day! Read more
I’m over at Stand Firm today. Enjoy! ******************** All my open tabs this morning are about Bari Weiss, Nick Canon, and Cancel Culture. I’ve tried to avoid clicking on anything in the NYT (I’m almost out of my free articles) as a matter of principle, but I keep getting sucked in anyway. This line from Ross Douthat strikes me as the one I’ve been searching around for: The right and the left both cancel; it’s just that today’s right is too weak... Read more
The First Thing So, the oldest child is 18. It was bound to happen, because of time and that sort of thing. In honor of this auspicious moment, we went full Babette’s Feast and did courses–les avocats aux crevettes, le potage au choufleur (my own invention–cauliflower soup, I wasn’t up to buying and cooking a live turtle), le boeuf Bourguignon, la salade, la fromage, le gateau creme glace. I probably spelled all that wrong. My French spelling is only slightly... Read more
It’s a busy day here, getting ready to celebrate the oldest child being 18. She’s fine with it but all the rest of us are horrified and unclear about how this could have happened. In celebration, we’ve done a short podcast about that Bethel video floating around on Twitter about how racism is over now. We were going to give our homeschooling advice so we shoved that in at the very end, in case you won’t be able to send your... Read more
The comments are still going on over on that How Can You Know If You’re A Christian piece of two weeks ago. Here is one that popped up yesterday that I think can be very easily answered by the lections apportioned for this Sunday: I see no grace in this piece. At all. And it places the Bible above everything else. I see idolatry. There are several things I like about this pithy critique. First of all, the commenter uses... Read more
Blogging is getting to be difficult because the cat, Gloria, expects to have string dangled for her at just the moment when I begin to think about turning to my keyboard with that morning nod of greeting, but let’s see what we can do because it is Friday after all. One Eglantine graduated from hand therapy yesterday. I had heard it might be a bit rough to say goodbye—and it was. So now I am constrained by the promise of... Read more
Preventing Grace
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