Between Two Worlds

The New Attitude Blog interviews Bob Kauflin:

Worship and Humble Orthodoxy
Worship and Culture

Dean Barnett gives us another FAQ.

(Link fixed.)

Thabiti blogs:

• What a Good Pastor Is To Do – Part 1
• What A Good Pastor Is To Do – Part 2
• What A Good Pastor Is To Do – Part 3
• What A Good Pastor Is To Do – Part 4
• What A Good Pastor Is To Do – Part 5
• What A Good Pastor Is To Do – Part 6

Mark Lauterbach, a pastor with Sovereign Grace Ministries in San Diego and proprietor of the invariably insightful GospelDrivenLife blog, is doing a helpful series on "Censorious Thoughts" (part 1 | part 2).

The phrase "censorious thoughts" comes from Jonathan Edwards's chapter on this topic in Charity and Its Fruits. Here's a quote:

And so persons are censorious when they condemn others as being unconverted and carnal men because they differ from them in opinion on some points that are not fundamental, or when they judge ill of their state from what they observe in them, for want of making due allowances for their natural temperament, or for their manner or want of education, or other peculiar disadvantages under which they labor, . . . setting up themselves, and their own experience, as a standard and rule to all others; not being sensible of that vast variety and liberty which the Spirit of God permits and uses in his saving work on the hearts of men. . . . In all these ways, men often act, not only censoriously, but as unreasonably (in not allowing any to be Christians who have not their own experiences) as if they would not allow any to be men who had not just their own stature, and the same strength, or temperament of body, and the very same features of countenance with themselves.

Tim Challies bravely begins to explain.

The New Yorker recently published a 4,000+ word article on Bible translations and publishing trends, with a particular focus on Thomas Nelson's marketing strategy and perspective.

Anyone else find this a bit disconcerting?

Here are C.J. Mahaney's ideas for Christmas gifts for guys.

(HT: Challies)

National Review has been producing a very handsome collection of cloth-bound volumes of classic children's literature. You can see all of their offerings thus far here.

Thomas Sowell writes:
More frightening than any particular beliefs or policies is an utter lack of any sense of a need to test those beliefs and policies against hard evidence. Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts but dogmatism will not be corrected by those who are wedded to a vision.

One of the most pervasive political visions of our time is the vision of liberals as compassionate and conservatives as less caring. It is liberals who advocate "forgiveness" of loans to Third World countries, a "living wage" for the poor and a "safety net" for all.

The context for Sowell's article is the new book by Professor Arthur Brooks, entitled Who Really Cares?

Professor Brooks began his research expecting that those who were in favor of larger government would also give more money to charity. But he found the opposite to be the case. He found, for example, that households that were headed by a conservative gave, on average, about 30% more to charity than households that were headed by a liberal. (This is despite the fact that liberal households, on average, earn more than conservative ones.)

Sowell continues:

Fundamental differences in ideology go back to fundamental assumptions about human nature. Based on one set of assumptions, it makes perfect sense to be a liberal. Based on a different set of assumptions, it makes perfect sense to be a conservative.

The two visions are not completely symmetrical, however. For at least two centuries, the vision of the left has included a belief that those with that vision are morally superior, more caring and more compassionate.

While both sides argue that their opponents are mistaken, those on the left have declared their opponents to be not merely in error but morally flawed as well. So the idea that liberals are more caring and compassionate goes with the territory, whether or not it fits the facts.

Those on the left proclaimed their moral superiority in the 18th century and they continue to proclaim it in the 21st century. What is remarkable is how long it took for anyone to put that belief to the test -- and how completely it failed that test.

The two visions are different in another way. The vision of the left exalts the young especially as idealists while the more conservative vision warns against the narrowness and shallowness of the inexperienced. This study found young liberals to make the least charitable contributions of all, whether in money, time or blood. Idealism in words is not idealism in deeds.

By the way, some might wonder about my motivation in posting such information. Professor Brooks writes: "This book is a call to action for the left, not a celebration of the right." I'm interested in neither exhorting the left nor encouraging the right--rather, I'm more concerned that we follow Sowell's counsel and stop believing mainstream-media mantras that are disconnected from reality.

Here are some links to Mark Driscoll teaching on the topic of "Preaching and Teaching Jesus from Scripture." This was a seminar delivered on September 12, 2006 at the regional Acts 29 conference.

Part 1 (Audio | Video) -- Current Perspectives on Preaching
Part 2 (Audio | Video) -- Reflections on the Narrative Preaching Trend
Part 3 (Audio | Video) -- Epistemological and Hermeneutical Implications on Preaching
Part 4 (Audio | Video) -- Historical Lessons on Preaching
Part 5 (Audio | Video) -- Ten Cautions & Encouragements for Preachers

The links will take you to outlines for each part, as well as options to stream or download both the audio and video.

After you account for inflation, the price of gasoline today (about $2.26/gallon) is 67 cents cheaper than it was in 1922. It's 69 cents cheaper than it was in 1981. The record average was set in March of 1981: $3.12 per gallon.

24 oz. bottles of water often go for about $1.29. That's $6.88 per gallon.

Pints of "premium" ice cream run for about $3.39. That's $27.00 per gallon!

Yet if you ask people which costs more--gasoline, water, or ice cream--gas always wins.

20/20's John Stossel writes:

We should marvel at how cheap gasoline is--what a bargain we get from oil companies. After all, it's easy to bottle water, but think about what it takes to produce and deliver gasoline. Oil has to be sucked out of the ground, sometimes from deep beneath an ocean. To get to the oil, the drills often have to bend and dig sideways through as much as five miles of earth. What they find then has to be delivered through long pipelines or shipped in monstrously expensive ships, then converted into three or more different formulas of gasoline and transported in trucks that cost more than $100,000 each. Then your local gas company must spend a fortune on safety devices to make sure you don't blow yourself up. At $2.26 a gallon (about forty six cents of which go to taxes), gas is miraculously cheap!

Remember that the next time the media complains about record-high gas prices!

John Stossel, Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity: Get Out the Shovel--Why Everything You Know Is Wrong, p. 22. [NB: All the figures from above come from this book.]

The following is from an email sent by Mars Hill's Ken Myers:

On Christmas Day, a new film based on a book by English novelist P. D. James will open in the U.S. The novel is The Children of Men, a book that came out just when MARS HILL AUDIO was starting up operation. I interviewed Alan Jacobs about that book for Volume 3 of what was then called the MARS HILL Tapes. It was the beginning of a fruitful and enjoyable collaboration with Alan.

I had interviewed P. D. James for Morning Edition when I worked at NPR in the early 1980s, and I had recycled part of that interview on Volume 2 of the Tapes. Now, I've recycled it again, for Audition, our monthly podcast. With the movie's release, I thought it appropriate to devote an entire issue of Audition to P. D. James's work, which has profound resonances with Christian concerns. So a few short extracts from my interview with James and a slightly expanded version of my interview with Alan Jacobs are augmented by a 20-minute version of an interview about James's fiction with Ralph Wood, who now teaches literary studies at Baylor.

Audition is free, either as streaming audio or as an MP3 download which you can save and listen to when you like. We have a special page at http://mhadigital.org for downloading it. If you're not accustomed to such things, go to the page linked above, look for the link at the end of the description of the podcast that says "MHA_Audition_005.mp3," and right-click on the link (Mac users control-click) to begin a download. (If you have iTunes, Audition is also available on the iTunes Music Store.)

I decided to send out this special message about this podcast because I think this film is a chance to introduce a lot of people to James's fiction. Ralph Wood thinks she is one of our most important living Christian novelists. Although Baroness James (as she is now officially addressed) is reticent about describing her own personal beliefs, there is no escaping the profoundly Christian framework of her fiction. In a 1994 essay about The Children of Men (published in Theology Today [JT note: see Rapidly Rises the Morning Tide--James's The Children of Men]), Wood wrote the following:

The key to P. D. James's fiction, especially her later work, is her Christianity. She regards our cultural malaise as having theological no less than ethical cause. The murder in A Taste for Death occurs in a church, for instance, and the murderer is not only a sadist but also a nihilist who revels in the god-like power inherent in the threat of death. He kills in order to prove that the cosmos is empty of divinity. Like Dostoevsky, James is determined to ask whether, if there be no God, all goodness is vacated and all evils unleashed. As a Christian, James knows that the answer is yes. But as a novelist, she has sought to make her faith implicit rather than overt. . . . James is an artist whose moral instruction is conveyed indirectly through aesthetic appeal, not a prophet who seeks our conversion by directly declaring the divine Word.

If you haven't already, I encourage you to listen to this issue of Audition. And I encourage you to consider whether you have friends, family members, or colleagues who may benefit from hearing it. Films released during the Christmas season rarely invite as much serious reflection as this one could; neither Elf nor The Santa Clause series nor Bad Santa left much room for thoughtful discussion of the Permanent Things. If you know anyone who sees Children of Men in a few weeks, think about forwarding a link to our podcast page to them. (And if you want to get really aggressive and get into a handbill-posting mode of notifying people at your school or church about our podcast, you may download an 8-1/2 x 11 pdf file to print and post in an appropriate place. It's at http://www.marshillaudio.org/posters/Audition-5.pdf.)

Finally, consider reading The Children of Men, which is both grim and profoundly hopeful. The film may not capture all of the spiritual nuances of the book (I haven't seen it yet), so don't judge the book by its adaptation.

Ms. James, in an interview with Ralph Wood, confessed: "I do find huge difficulty with much of the dogma." Nonetheless, she said: "When I began The Children of Men, I didn’t set out to write a Christian book. I set out to deal with the idea I had. What would happen to society with the end of the human race? At the end of it, I realized I had written a Christian fable. It was quite a traumatic book to write."

The book is available at Amazon.com.

See also Woods's essay, A Case for P.D. James as a Christian Novelist.

Here is the official movie site for The Children of Men. The trailer is also online.

Few products in the Christian market meet the standards of excellence set by Focus on the Family's Radio Theatre--auto dramas replete with a full award-winning cast, cinema sound, original musical scores.

The latest installment is entitled: Amazing Grace: The Inspirational Stories of William Wilberforce, John Newton, and Olaudah Equiano.

An award-winning cast and cinema-quality sound effects set the stage for this dramatic in-depth look at three courageous men who worked to overthrow the slave trade in 18th-century England: Christian politician William Wilberforce, redeemed slave-trader John Newton, and freedman merchant Olaudah Equiano. A bonus CD offers behind-the-scenes information and extensive historical notes. Six CDs.

Charles Spurgeon: "Never write what you dare not sign. An anonymous letter-writer is a sort of assassin, who wears a mask, and stabs in the dark. Such a man is a fiend with a pen. If discovered, the wretch will be steeped in the blackest infamy."

(HT: Doug Wilson)

Bob Kauflin explains how John Owen helped him see light during a particularly dark and painful season for his soul.

If you're a critic of Emergent and you want Tony Jones to respond to your criticism, you'll first have to read Peter Rollins's book, How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church. He will no longer respond to critics who have not read it.

Tony writes that it "is the best bloody book yet on the the emerging church! . . . If you want to get the emerging church, read this book."

In the foreword, Brian McLaren declares himself a "raving fan" of the book, and says that it is "one of the two or three most rewarding books of theology I have read in ten years."

By Dean Barrett.

I read opinion articles virtually every day about the Iraq War (what went wrong, what to do, etc.), but I rarely link to them. Today is an exception. Shelby Steele's WSJ op-ed, Our Unceasing Ambivalence, is quite insightful and well worth the read.

Agnieszka Tennant pens an excellent critique of the Jesus-is-my-boyfriend motif that is becoming increasingly popular.

I don't question the devotion of anyone who says she loves Christ intensely, whatever language she uses to express it.

But I have little patience for taking biblical metaphors too far and giving one's relationship with God an air of irreverent chumminess. Somehow, the scenario in which "his princess" shaves her legs for a date with Jesus seems to leave little room for fear of God.

By the way, the idea of shaving your legs for a date with Jesus is not a "straw man" argument. It's from a book by a popular author (whose name is not cited). Read the whole thing.

Update: Sticking with the dating-Jesus theme, Mickey McLean at WorldMagBlog posts:

Jesus has returned to Earth for Armageddon, lives in L.A., works as a carpenter for furniture retailer Ikea and goes out on blind dates. At least that's how the husband and wife team of Brian and Gigi Grazer see it in their upcoming film Prodigal Son. "It's a love it or hate it idea, but we're not aiming to offend," Mrs. Grazer said. "He won't be having sex. It'll be a disarming romantic comedy, a story of unrequited love, sort of like Splash." Mr. Grazer and Ron "Opie Cunningham" Howard own Imagine Entertainment, the folks who brought The Da Vinci Code to the big screen.

Ray Van Neste is churning out the blog reviews. Check out his reviews of Calvin Miller's O Shepherd, Where Art Thou?, P&R's Crown and Covenant series, the ESV Reverse Interlinear, and Suffering and the Sovereignty of God.

Dr. Kenneth Stein is the William E. Schatten professor of contemporary Middle Eastern history, political science, and Israeli studies at Emory University, and the director of the Institute for the Study of Modern Israel and Middle East Research Program at Emory College. He once co-authored a book on the Middle East with former president Jimmy Carter. For the past 23 years he has been a fellow at Emory's Carter Center, and served as its first director (1983-1986). Carter guest-lectured for Stein's undergrad class at Emory each year. According to this blog post at ABCNews.com, Stein was "in many ways was Carter's 'brain' on the Middle East for years."

In response to Carter's new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, Stein recently sent an email of resignation from the Carter Center. Stein complains that the book is

replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions, and simply invented segments. Aside from the one-sided nature of the book, meant to provoke, there are recollections cited from meetings where I was the third person in the room, and my notes of those meetings show little similarity to points claimed in the book. Being a former President does not give one a unique privilege to invent information or to unpack it with cuts, deftly slanted to provide a particular outlook. . . . Falsehoods, if repeated often enough become meta-truths, and they then can become the erroneous baseline for shaping and reinforcing attitudes and for policy-making. The history and interpretation of the Arab-Israeli conflict is already drowning in half-truths, suppositions, and self-serving myths; more are not necessary. In due course, I shall detail these points and reflect on their origins."

Craig Blomberg reviews Ben Witherington's new commentary on Matthew--and along the way explains the importance of editorial excellence.

Joseph Epstein writes about The Vocabula Review, an online monthly journal by Robert Hartwell Fiske, whose purpose is to battle "nonstandard, careless English" and to embrace "clear, expressive English."

The Vocabula Review, in fact, has two mottoes: "A society is generally as lax as its language" and "Well spoken is half sung." Mr. Fiske believes that honest language is elegant language. His online magazine is neither a forum for prescriptivism nor for his prejudices, but deals extensively with the endless oddities and richness of language.

Mr. Fiske's own characteristic tone is perhaps best caught in his Dimwit's Dictionary. In that 400-page work a vast body of words and phrases are shown up for the linguistic ciphers they are. He has established a number of categories for "Expressions That Dull Our Reason and Dim Our Insight." These included grammatical gimmicks, which are expressions (such as "whatever," "you had to be there") that are used by people who have lost their powers of description; ineffectual phrases ("the fact remains," "the thing about it is," "it is important to realize") used by people to delay coming to the point or for simple bewilderment; infantile phrases ("humongous," "gazillions," "everything's relative"), which show evidence of unformed reasoning; moribund metaphors ("window of opportunity") and insipid similes ("cool as a cucumber"); suspect superlatives ("an amazing person," "the best and the brightest"), which are just what the category suggests; torpid terms ("prioritize," "proactive," "significant other"), which are vapid and dreary; not to mention plebeian sentiments, overworked words, popular prescriptions, quack equations, and wretched redundancies.

Read the whole thing.

Here is Linda Hirshman, author of Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World, talking about Al Mohler in a recent interview:

He said [concerning Ms. Hirshman], "This woman is the instrumentality of the devil." He lied about what I said, and then he told everybody that I was the end of civilization as we know it.

Dr. Mohler's response qualifies for "quote of the day":

Well, a little truth-telling will help here. I never said that Linda Hirshman 'is the instrumentality of the devil." As a matter of fact, I have not said that of anyone. Then she says that I identified her as "the end of civilization as we know it." She flatters herself. I do believe that her ideas--if taken seriously by many persons--would be the end of civilization as we know it. There would be no one left to care for the children.

Beliefnet.com has published a lengthy interview with Hirshman and a response by Mohler:

Linda Hirshman, On the Frontline of the Mommy Wars
Al Mohler, Women Choose Motherhood