Entries that relate to Pascal’s wager.
The author is an evangelical Protestant (53, 145) and a professor of humanities at Houston Baptist University. I recall listening to — and enjoying — a lecture series by him on C.S. Lewis, and the title of this book sounded important and its length (271 pages) reasonable. It was a good decision to get it … [Read more…]
This book collects the Christian conversion stories of sixty people, most of them famous and all in his or her own words (with a short introduction to each by the editor). They are fairly short accounts: The book is about 400 pages long, so that’s less than seven pages apiece, minus the intro and page … [Read more…]
There are lots of reasons to believe in God, and I thought a list would be helpful. (Caveat: Whether He is the God of the New Testament is of course a related but distinct question, and some of the reasons below are specific to Christianity and some aren’t.) One could write a book on many … [Read more…]
One way to use Pascal’s Wager (the way I use it here) is to have four quadrants — what happens if you believe and God exists, what happens if you believe and He doesn’t exist, what happens if you don’t believe and He does exist, and what happens if you don’t believe and He doesn’t … [Read more…]
This book is short (132 pages plus notes); the author says that it is drawn from a longer, earlier work by him, Money, Possessions, and Eternity. It is also straightforward and unabashed in its message: While faith is what gets us into Heaven, it’s works that determine how and to what extent we will be … [Read more…]
Walker Percy is one of my favorite authors, and this book was given to me by Professor Michael DeBow, one of my favorite people, who picked it up in St. Francisville, Louisiana, at the annual Walker Percy Weekend there. Percy is a Southern Catholic existentialist — an interesting combination. This book devotes a chapter each … [Read more…]
Happy Easter! He is risen! Since I’m writing something about every other book of the New Testament, it would be odd to skip the Gospels. On the other hand, one always worries that it is presumptuous at best to try to boil down God’s word, and that is especially so with the Gospels. What’s more, … [Read more…]
This is a very good book by a well-known and acclaimed Christian author today, the first of his I think I’ve read. The first part talks about how life and the universe itself is miraculous (the narrow range of conditions essential, etc.), and the second part is series of modern-day miracles attested to by people … [Read more…]
As the title advertises, this biography focuses on C.S. Lewis’s spiritual life; its method is largely to quote from Lewis’s own words and letters, and there is not a lot of authorial speculation. So the book is straightforward and reliable, but there’s not much to surprise anyone already familiar with Lewis’s life and works. Still … [Read more…]
This is a 1995 anthology responding to the Jesus Seminar. It’s very impressive: dense, serious, persuasive, straightforward, and concise, with contributions from the likes of William Lane Craig, Gary Habermas, Craig Blomberg, Craig Evans, etc. Some notes: In chapter 1, John Meier’s A Marginal Jew is cited favorably as generally supportive. Religious experience can be … [Read more…]