A Review of People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooke I was not familiar with the author, but I picked this book thinking it might have all the elements of a good bit of fiction. It’s a combination mystery, history, and treatise, promising to instruct on matters of medieval Jewish practice and religious custom with […]
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Conspiracy Theory
I recently toured the latest and greatest on conspiracy theories about the government. I think it’s interesting that the very phrase, “conspiracy theory,” carries with it the implication that it’s a product of paranoia rather than reality. In that way, it can be dismissed. But wait! Isn’t that what the government wants? My view is […]
Read more...Another Dangerous Idea
The Conflict of Ideas This post is a review of C.S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea, by Victor Reppert, and a discussion of the ideas in it. Victor Reppert wrote this book in 2003. My impression is that the title is primarily a marketing decision. It is intended to call to mind the title of Daniel Dennett’s […]
Read more...But If Not
I looked forward to seeing the movie “Dunkirk.” I even went to see it at a movie theater; unusual for me. It seemed to start off weird, though, and never quite recovered. It was almost as if they were trying to minimize the heroic stuff. It also felt a bit like they were trying to drag […]
Read more...The Runway
In a peculiar way, those days before a person’s inevitable end to this life have a particular heft, so to speak. A feeling of particular consequence. We look at life from a higher vantage point, and better distinguish what is important and real, from what is silly and illusory. What happens next? How can we not […]
Read more...Skeptical of Skeptics
I once subscribed to something called Skeptic Magazine, in hopes that it would enlighten me on what the other side was thinking. I assumed it would be advocacy of an anti-religious viewpoint. There’s certainly no dearth of that around, however, so why, you might wonder, would I be interested in this particular magazine? It was because […]
Read more...Evidence of Things Unseen
Review of Evidence of Things Unseen, by Marianne Wiggins I picked this book up because of the title. It’s a phrase from Hebrews, chapter 11: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, evidence of things unseen.” (KJV). Non-believers sometimes cite it as logical bootstrapping, but it’s not. Other translations get away from the […]
Read more...Submission
Review of Submission, by Michel Houellebecq The book is written from the first-person point of view of Francois. He is a scholar specializing in the works of Joris-Karl Huysmans. In many respects, he is Huysmans, except that Huysmans drifted into Catholicism; Francois into Islam. Like Huysmans, Francois is “the misanthropic aesthete and loner” who overcomes […]
Read more...Abundant Living
In Time Horizon, we contrasted eternal and temporal perspectives on the events of one’s lifetime. Now we consider a sky-high Biblical perspective on the matter. I once became fed up with my lack of understanding of the old testament. Why do we lug that thing around, when only the new testament seems relevant? I’m confessing […]
Read more...Time Horizon
In Morality and Time, we discussed the individual subjective “time horizon” which is a consequence of our living inside a time-bound perspective, rather than in eternity. Now we incorporate that eternal perspective. Long and Short Time Horizons If our time horizon is very short, then our life is in a sense not a life at […]
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