Most of us know Augustine through either the Confessions or City of God, and maybe on rare occasions through his work On the Trinity. But it’s easy to forget that before he was an autobiographer or a cultural critic, he was first and foremost a pastor. The great bulk of his writings are dedicated to the exposition of Scripture or its application to the life of the church and of individual Christians. As with pastors today, this included teaching his flock how best... Read more
If you’re looking for a book to listen to while re-grouting the tiles in your bathtub, you could do a lot worse than the audio version of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Thuvia: Maid of Mars. If you’ve not encountered Burroughs before, before you pick up Thuvia you should read the first three books in the series (but maybe not all eleven of them), and maybe Tarzan just for good measure. And also as a disclaimer: if you buy the old Del Ray versions of... Read more
A Review of The Solace of Open Spaces Read more
with C.R. Wiley’s recent post about Harry Potter. If you’ve not read it, you should go over there now and do so. As you’d expect from him, it’s well-written, thoughtful, and mostly correct. Even better, he blasts the Harry Potter series not for silly pearl-clutching reasons like witchcraft, but for the very legitimate argument that children’s literature caters far too much to the idea that each one of us is a hero deep down. In his words, the ‘dark magic’ that... Read more
I like to think that the author of Solaris would agree with me that the main character was completely wrong at the end of the book. If this is not the case, then an otherwise excellent classic of science fiction has a fairly weak ending. Older readers of this blog will likely have heard of Solaris through the George Clooney adaptation or the earlier Soviet version, neither of which I’ve seen and so cannot comment on. The book by the Polish author Stanislaw... Read more
Christian Hamaker's Top 20 Movies of 2017 Read more
Denominations have fallen on hard times these days. Even as traditional Christianity is on the rise (and praise God for that!), it’s increasingly chic for these increasing numbers of traditionalist Christians to eschew identification with specific denominations. Whole churches which are part of major denominations downplay their own membership in those denominations for numerous reasons, not least of which often includes a distaste for the existence of denominations in the first place. And yet, this modern sensibility overlooks the importance... Read more
An Interview with Keith Getty on the state of music in the modern church. Read more
Science fiction has always been a discordant jumble of optimism and bleak despair. On the one hand, you’ve got all the hope that comes from curing diseases, the affordable proliferation of the necessities of life, and the certainty of the results of the scientific method. We can see all that has been done by human reason and apparently without divine intervention, so who needs God? The future is bright and getting brighter! On the other hand, you’ve got all the... Read more
While I don’t closely follow what’s being taught in our schools these days (despite regularly bemoaning it, whatever it is), I understand that some of the classics are no longer taught in American secondary (‘lower’?) education. If what has happened to Longfellow has happened to Washington Irving, that is truly a shame. I read a selection of Washington Irving’s works last year, and they were simply fantastic. If nothing else, Irving is a wonderful writer and should be read for that... Read more
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In