I used to be a fan of David Lynch. And then his films got weird. It could be argued they were always weird (see: Eraserhead). On occasion, he would mix in a traditionally linear narrative like The Elephant Man or The Straight Story. But his films have drifted more and more into absurdism. A friend recently [...]
I consider myself a “modified Calvinist” — modified in the sense that I don’t subscribe to all the main tenets of classical Calvinism. (I especially bristle at the notion that God destines some for damnation, that Christ died only for the elect, and, to a lesser degree, that grace cannot be resisted.) Lately, I’ve suspected [...]
They say that exceptions prove the rule. But when it comes to marketing your book, it seems there’s enough exceptions to question the rules. I was thinking about that when I read Jim Rubart’s entry at Novel Rocket last week entitled You Can Only Write in One Genre. Period. End of Story. Yes, Rubart is [...]
In his ongoing attempt to persuade believers that “Christianity is an illusion,” John Loftus recently offered What Best Debunks Christianity and Religion. Loftus concludes there’s many reasons. In fact, “there isn’t even a bad personal reason to reject the Christian faith,” which amounts to a roulette wheel of potential dumb excuses. Nevertheless, Loftus isolates two [...]
99.3% of all statistics are misused. Okay, so I just made up that number. “Numbers” are what Bradley Wright’s Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites …and Other Lies You’ve Been Told traffics in. To be more exact, it’s the misuse of numbers, particularly how they relate to Christians, that Wright is bent on exposing. And there’s plenty [...]
The title of Jay Bakker’s forthcoming book is Faith, Doubt, and Other Lines I’ve Crossed. Doubt is a well-worn (if not tired) subject among religious progressives. But it’s the reference to crossing “lines” that I find ironic, mainly because erasing lines, not reinforcing them, appears closer to the postmodernist’s intentions. You can’t cross lines that [...]
Men and women have two “sides” — that is, a masculine and a feminine side. Despite the controversies, changing scientific research, sociological theories, and gender-role debates, this seems indisputable. We are byproducts of a male and a female and are infused with both genders, so to speak. So… Women have a masculine and a feminine [...]
Obey your leaders and submit to their authority. They keep watch over you as men who must give an account. Obey them so that their work will be a joy, not a burden, for that would be of no advantage to you. — Hebrews 13:17 So I’ve been assembling notes for a non-fiction, memoir project [...]
I’ve been reading, and enjoying, Bradley Wright’s Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites… and Other Lies You’ve Been Told. Wright is Associate Professor of Sociology and UConn. The assertion of his book is pretty simple: The numbers purported to tout the decline of evangelicalism are being wrongly used… By liberals and secularists who want to see evangelicalism [...]
Back in 1968, in The God Who Is There, Francis Schaeffer wrote that the problem with communicating Christianity to a new generation was centered on a new view of truth, one detached from an objective, knowable reality. Jonathan D. Fitzgerald, author of the new ebook Not Your Mother’s Morals, writes from the perspective of this [...]
