Our church’s summer sermon series was on the first eight chapters of Acts, so I thought I’d share a few notes on it. Of course we know that, in Acts 5, Ananias and Sapphira became famous — or, rather, infamous — for their dishonesty in contributing the proceeds from a land sale to the early … [Read more…]
There’s an interview of Stephen C. Meyer by Terrell Clemmons (“Faithful Knowledge,” 42, 45) in the September/October 2024 issue of Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, in which the former says (emphasis in original): …. Someone once said that the work of the Holy Spirit is to make subjectively real to the individual believer things that … [Read more…]
This blogpost has some addenda — pieces by Lyman Stone and Cameron Hilditch — to my earlier one, “What Does God Think of Us Americans?” I begin with an interesting paper in April 2020 by Stone here. Next, Hilditch, in National Review Online on December 13, 2020, cites and discusses Stone here. Stone then had … [Read more…]
Recently I was sitting at a table in the food court of our local shopping mall. As I looked over the court and watched the mall’s denizens, I wondered what America’s Founders would have thought of it all. Of course, when you put the question that way, you think first of what they would think … [Read more…]
There’s a new book out, A Summer with Pascal, by Antoine Compagnon. I have not read it, but I did read a review of it in the Wall Street Journal last week (July 27-28, 2024, at page C12), and it looks interesting. I feel I should note the book’s publication on this blogsite — after … [Read more…]
The last letter that the apostle Paul wrote was likely Second Timothy, and on the last page of the current issue of Touchstone magazine there is a thoughtful column about it (Patrick Henry Reardon, “As It Is Written …: The Library Left Behind,” Touchstone, July/August 2024, at 56; here’s the link). The column focuses, in … [Read more…]
I recently posted this on National Review Online‘s “The Corner”: I very much enjoyed Kayla Bartsch’s Corner post on Friday (“Sociology Comes for Sundays”) and would like to add a bit to it. It is certainly true that “religious practice” can have a variety of secular benefits, even if one lacks solid faith, and that noting … [Read more…]
Premise: Christians believe that God wants us to love one another and, even prior to that, to love Him; salvation also requires that we accept Jesus Christ as divine. See, e.g., John 3:16-18 and 14:6. Now, it is commonly argued that it seems very unfair that someone who leads a good life, full of selfless … [Read more…]
Joseph Epstein is what used to be called, and I guess still is, a “man of letters.” That is, he is a writer of his own books, essays, and shorter pieces, on a wide variety of nonscientific subjects, as well as a literary critic. If you’ve run across him lately, it’s probably through short columns … [Read more…]
There are a variety of plans for reading the Bible in a year but — call me a cynic — I bet it has happened more than once that a person embarking on one or the other fails to finish the Bible by December 31. Let’s face it: The Bible is a pretty long book, … [Read more…]