Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
The history of the Twentieth Century is one written in blood. Between two world wars, the procession of genocides from Armenia to Stalin to the Holocaust, China and the Killing Fields, millions seemed to vanish for causes that are better hated than understood. Is there one conflict that we can look at than encapsulates the …
Continue reading "Why the Spanish Civil War is Still Important"
Educating new Christians in the basics of the faith has always been an important task of the Church. A few years back I featured a series on Cyril of Jerusalem's Catechetical Lectures, which date from the fourth century. Evangelical churches can be very casual about the whole business, their reputation for dogmatism notwithstanding. With Roman …
Continue reading "Revisiting the Catholicism of "Christ Among Us""
Boomers have always had a love-hate relationship with the generation before them, transitioning from "don't trust anyone over thirty" to calling them "the Greatest Generation." Most of those who brought us into the world are gone now, and the ones who are left are "full of years" to use the Bible's expression. Part of the …
One of the things Americans politicians endlessly yammer about is the way they're "fighting" something or someone. It never ends--they fight special interests, they fight the President, and when they want to be more positive they're "fighting for you". The result of this mentality is obvious these days. But what if there's really something--or someone--worth …
Continue reading "Book Review: Daniel-Rops' A Fight for God"
In the Nazi-Occupied France of 1943, the Gestapo visited the French publishing house Fayard to break the plates of a new book they were publishing. So what was the Gestapo stopping the presses on? How to Help the Allies When They Finally Get Around to Invading France? Hardly. The book they were so concerned about …
Political analysis and punditry can date awfully quickly. Nevertheless--and this is especially true in a place like the United States, whose structural continuity is exceptional--some pieces of political prose, especially when written in a historical context, can have relevance for several generations. One of those analyses--actually a series of essays not originally intended to be …
Anyone who has been around Pentecostal academic circles (and yes, they do exist) has heard a great deal about the Azusa Street revival of 1906, an event which marks (but does not solely define) the beginnings of modern Pentecost. And they've heard many things about. But how do they know these things? How, for example, …
Continue reading "Book Review: Frank Bartleman's Azusa Street"
When we think of China today, we think of a nation growing very fast economically and taking its place as one of the great powers of the world. Getting to that point--or getting to that point again, if one takes a long view of history--took a course of great suffering and several unexpected turns (how …
One day while growing up in Palm Beach, I stopped to visit my grandmother. As I’ve documented numerous times on this blog, I frequently found myself on the wrong end of Palm Beach’s brutal social system (well, the young part of it, at least.) In response to my complaints about the place, she, in some …
One of the challenges of New Testament study at any level is simply putting ourselves--and the events and people depicted therein--into the world in which they actually happened and lived. The Greco-Roman and Jewish world at the turn of the first millennium has many features that are on their face unfamiliar to us, yet are …
Continue reading "Book Review: Peoples of the New Testament World: An Illustrated Guide"
Positive Infinity 