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…]
1. It’s a mistake to see detailed political guidance in the Bible. It seems to give a broad range — allowing us, for example, even to choose a king or not (Deuteronomy 17:14-20), and recognizing that political authority is distinct from religious authority (“Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s”). … [Read more…]
The author is himself a rabbi, and a young one, being only 37 when the book was published. He feels passionately that both Christians and Jews need to pay greater attention to Jesus’ Jewishness. The final paragraph of the book (184) reads: “Victor Hugo once said, ‘All the forces in the world are not as … [Read more…]
This is a book about a book. It recounts how C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity came to be written and its remarkable longevity and influence over the past 75 years or so. Professor Marsden of Notre Dame does a splendid job, and anyone who is a fan of C.S. Lewis’s book — and of course, as you … [Read more…]
If asked why Jesus became fully human and came to earth, I think most Christians would answer, “To die for our sins.” That’s certainly true, but when you think about it, He must also have come to do some teaching. At a minimum, people had to be told of His sacrifice and what they had … [Read more…]
This is a collection of a hundred or so pages’ worth of the comic strip of that name, which is a mashup of sixties advertising clip art with Jesus setting straight various average Joe and Jo Anne types. It’s okay: The first time you read the strip, it’s novel and funny, and some of the … [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…]
Let’s cut to the chase: In this collection of hundreds of mostly short, fairly pithy sayings, there is no doubt about the best one. It’s number 43 in book XIV: “Yuan Jang sat waiting with his legs spread wide. The Master said, ‘To be neither modest nor deferential when young, to have passed on nothing … [Read more…]
The prophet Isaiah was considered “the greatest Old Testament prophet,” says my NIV study Bible, and he’s quoted “at least 50 times in the New Testament.” Isaiah was a prophet under five kings, and he talked about both the northern kingdom (Israel) and southern kingdom (Judah), while the other major prophets are predicting the fall of … [Read more…]