Snap-shot Beliefs

Sen­sa­tion­al­ism is unde­ni­ably one of the marks of our cul­ture. It would appear that not only do we all want atten­tion, but we want to make it seem as if the things we are get­ting atten­tion for, are extra­or­di­nary. Read­ing Pas­cal last night: Van­ity is so anchored in the human heart that a sol­dier, a cadet, a cook, a kitchen porter boasts, and wants to have admir­ers, and even philoso­phers want them, and those who write against them want the pres­tige of hav­ing writ­ten well, and those who read them want the pres­tige of hav­ing read them, and I, writ­ing this, per­haps have this desire, and those who will read this…1 “And those who will read…

And John Loftus’ Assessment…

Of The Infi­del Delu­sion, appar­ently he isn’t all that impressed either. Read here. Update: Appar­ently they’re quite keen at shoot­ing back at each other. Tri­ablogue here, and Lof­tus, again, here. I’m not entirely sure what to think of their cor­re­spon­dence over this book (or these books). It appears child­ish and vit­ri­olic on both parts.

“The Christian Delusion”

First it was Dawkins’ The God Delu­sion, now it is John F. Lof­tus’ (gen­eral edi­tor; you know, the guy who’s always com­plain­ing that William Lane Craig won’t debate him) The Chris­t­ian Delu­sion. Another book writ­ten with the express inter­est of destroy­ing Chris­t­ian the­ism in 500 pages or less. Read­ing the blurbs for the book, you’d think more peo­ple would be impressed. Not the guys at Tri­ablogue, who have writ­ten an almost 200 page cri­tique of The Chris­t­ian Delu­sion, call­ing it — per­haps uno­rig­i­nally — The Infi­del Delusion.

Stephen Meyer interviewed by R.C. Sproul

An inter­est­ing inter­view I first heard of on Justin Taylor’s blog. This inter­view is described as, “RC Sproul sits down with Stephen Meyer, author of the book, “Sig­na­ture in the Cell”, and they dis­cuss phi­los­o­phy, evo­lu­tion, edu­ca­tion, Intel­li­gent Design, and more.” Enjoy. Seri­ously, it’s really good. Listen. Now!

Kreeft’s Ecumenical Jihad

Well, it seems a mid-term and essay have taken con­trol of my life, so I won’t be able to put any sub­stan­tial thought towards post­ing (for today). I do think it’s worth men­tion­ing, how­ever, a talk given by Peter Kreeft on some­thing he calls “ecu­meni­cal jihad”–that through (reli­gious) sep­a­ra­tion comes unity (mighty para­dox­i­cal, isn’t it?). It’s about an hour and a half long, but it’s well worth the lis­ten if you’re inter­ested in hear­ing a lit­tle about inter­faith coop­er­a­tion. Though, to be clear, Kreeft is not a plu­ral­ist. You can lis­ten to the lec­ture here.

Apologist’s Evening Prayer

I just fin­ished Peter Kreeft’s Heaven and Hell, and he closes the book with a piece of poetry writ­ten by C.S. Lewis. I’m sur­prised I haven’t come across this before, the admirer of Lewis that I am (I’m told its from his book Reflec­tions on the Psalms). He seems to be say­ing that there is a cer­tain dan­ger in intel­lec­tual argu­ments and log­i­cal proofs for God’s exis­tence. Namely, that such things may very well deaden one’s faith, turn­ing it into an intel­lec­tual exer­cise, rather than a mat­ter of the heart (if one’s not care­ful). (Unfor­tu­nately) from expe­ri­ence, I can attest to this. From all my lame defeats and oh! much more From all the vic­to­ries that…

Stretched Illustrations?

(**Spoil­ers below**) Some times I won­der how peo­ple arrive at cer­tain inter­pre­ta­tions of “art”. Strangely enough, I came across this arti­cle which sets about using Avatar  as a metaphor for “emer­gent evan­ge­lism”. The main thrust of the arti­cle is that we “don’t bring God to the other,” rather, that “we find God in the other”–Jake Sully is the per­fect exam­ple of this sort of mind­set, or so it’s claimed. I don’t want to exam­ine the entire arti­cle, only one para­graph. Evan­ge­lism is a two-way street This is where the Avatar movie is a great metaphor for what evan­ge­lism could and should become. Although Jake Sully entered the Na’vi world (Pan­dora) ini­tially with an agenda in mind,…

Avatar, Pagan Advertisement?

It’s sur­pris­ing the things you’ll find on YouTube, and I mean that in a good way. (**Spoiler if you haven’t seen Avatar**) I came across an excerpt from one of Mark Driscoll’s ser­mons (his most recent series on Luke) in which he gives a brief analy­sis of the ‘wildly pop­u­lar’ movie Avatar. This is Driscoll at his most can­did: Avatar is “the most demonic, Satanic film I’ve ever seen. How any Chris­t­ian could watch that with­out see­ing the overt demonism is beyond me”. Ouch. I have to say, though, that I agree with him. I ended up see­ing Avatar a few weeks after release (the only time I could get tick­ets), and the one thing…

Musical musings

Whether I’m writ­ing an essay for school, or writ­ing new con­tent for here (well, or try­ing!) I almost always have some sort of music play­ing. I fig­ure it wouldn’t be fair of me to keep these artists to myself, as it were. So, I’m going to share a few with you all (before get­ting back to my new post for this evening). All of these artists are from Can­dyrat Records (YouTube chan­nel ‘rpoland’), the first three artists pri­mar­ily fin­ger pick, with the last (Stef­fen) play­ing some­thing very jazzy and highly rec­om­mended. If you like any of what fol­lows, check out their YouTube chan­nel as there is a lot of good tal­ent there. Don Ross — Tight…

McLaren, again?!

Well, I haven’t had the honor (if you can call it that) of read­ing Brian McLaren’s newest book (A New Kind of Chris­tian­ity), though from what I’ve heard it’s essen­tially a vin­di­ca­tion of every­one who believed(s?) McLaren to be teach­ing some very dan­ger­ous things (it might also cause some to recon­sider the ‘heat’ they sub­jected D.A. Car­son and oth­ers to). I recently came across a very good review of the book (and lengthy) from Kevin DeY­oung, co-author of Why We’re Not Emer­gent. If you still aren’t sure about McLaren it’s def­i­nitely worth the read, he’s even assem­bled it into .pdf for­mat. You can find the review on Kevin DeYoung’s blog.