It sneaks up on you unawaresWhile you are preoccupiedIt catches you quite unpreparedEnthralled as you are in your pride. Blindsided, you flinch instinctivelyWhen suddenly you are accostedYou realize in an instance ‘it’s now…’Or else you’ve totally lost it. All those years of pure preparati...

THE NEW TESTAMENT IN ANTIQUITY--- G.M. Burge, L.H. Cohick, G. L. Green (Zondervan 2009). ‘Of the making of Introductions to the New Testament, there is no end, and much reading is a weariness of the flesh’ but not all Introductions are created equal. This particular Introduction seeks to thoroug...

Sometimes Christmas movies do better in the spring, and this is one such movie. Released on Christmas day, but still playing in some theaters (having taken in a modest $14 million), this movie keeps on percolating along, pleasing one audience after another. In a season of bad, mad, and sad movies, t...

I had originally planned to entitle this little series of essays ‘restoring hope during a crashing economy’, but in the end I decided the double entendre was worth keeping in these ambiguous times. With a profound grasp of the obvious, I am here to say today that America, and indeed the world ec...

[THE FOLLOWING IS A SMALL EXCERPT FROM MY LITTLE BOOK ON WORK IN THE LIGHT OF KINGDOM COME] BW3 I would like to conclude this discussion about what God calls, gifts, and inspires us to do by talking briefly about a particular profession that Christians need to think better of--- the vocation of arti...

So I get back from Houston, and don't even change clothes, 'cause me and the Missus are heading to Danville Kentucky (not to be confused with Danville, Va.) to see The New York Philharmonic at Centre College. This is probably the only time since the time of Dan'l Boone, which is to say, the only tim...

It’s Lent and time to think about the things we should be repenting of. Of course too often we think in the narrow terms of sins with a capital S that we ought to abstain from, but in this post I am thinking about ordinary things which are not sins in themselves which nonetheless require some seri...

There are not a lot of books I find stimulating enough to deserve the 'full roll out' review and dialogue with, but Andy Crouch's new book Culture-Making is one of them. I am currently working on a little book in my Kingdom series for Eerdmans (the first is out next month and entitled Imminent Domai...

Tom Wright working away in Bishop Aukland Palace Here below (see the link) is an interesting but all too brief interview of Tom Wright as he talks about his forthcoming book on "Justification" (apparently out in May by IVP on this side of the water). What Tom is stressing is that final justification...

I have just come from a movie which I did not expect to move me the way this film did, and it has not one but two Oscar worthy performances by Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes. This is a dense morality drama which deals with moral consequences of actions, ranging from the immorality of a teenager bein...