How Can We Find Happiness?
How and How Not to Be Happy is an exercise in asking questions and reasoning through options for the source of happiness with the aim of explaining to a broad audience where true happiness can be found.
Read MoreCan't Change the World? You Can Still Be Faithful.
Impossible Christianity isn’t DeYoung’s sexiest work. It is clearly and solidly written. It can be read in a couple of hours or subdivided to be consumed over a few days. It tends to be more sermonic than ground-breaking. Nevertheless, it is a good and helpful book.
This is the sort of book that would be a great gift for the struggling parent of young children wondering how the treadmill of dishes, laundry, activities, and meals could matter in eternity. This is the sort of book that can serve as a reminder to those who are not leading ministries that their contributions are vitally important. Impossible Christianity offers a kind word for those who are struggling to find meaning in the repetition of daily life. As such, it is a valuable book for the church.
Read MoreHow the West Got WEIRDER
For Americans the year 1776 has legendary status. It is, of course, the year that the Continental Congress declared the United States independent from the colonial power of Britian.
As it turns out, the year was actually globally significant in a number of other ways. The Industrial Revolution was getting into full swing, there were a number of significant philosophical movements afoot whose effects we are still discovering today.
Andrew Wilson’s book, Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West is an attempt to bring many of those streams together to help explain how the world got turned upside down.
Read MoreThe Blessing of a Limited Life
Guardrails keep us on the pathway. They prevent us from falling off the cliff. They give us comfort that, though the paneling on our car may be damaged, if we slip on the icy road, yet we will not die.
A mountain road without those guardrails leaves us with a much greater fear. And that fear brings with it a greater pain. We experience that pain whether or not the worst happens, because we know there is a much higher likelihood that it will.
Read MoreEducation as Moral Formation
More than a decade into our home education experience, Macauley’s book fairly represents what we have been trying to do. I commend For the Children’s Sake to parents trying to figure out how to make a choice about educational methodologies. The Charlotte Mason approach is worth consideration, at least.
Macauley is realistic about the approach. She repeatedly notes areas in which she didn’t always get it right, because any educational process entails imperfect humans helping imperfect humans to learn. But she also provides illustrations of ways that her chosen approach can be self-correcting.
Read MoreSchool and Wonder at God's Creation
Whether we are studying the interaction of heavenly bodies, the multiplication tables, or the differences between a noun and a pronoun, we should never cease to consider the big picture. The God who created all things did so with order and continues to maintain the world in that order. Our response should be wonder at the works of his hands and a desire to understand his handiwork better.
Read MoreBecoming Curious, Not Skeptical
Putting the Socratic method to work to develop curiosity is a good thing. Encouraging honest exploring of different viewpoints among people of all ages would improve our discourse. As Socrates’s life demonstrates, the toxic discourse is nothing new
Read MoreGlorify God By Thinking Well
If we learned how to ask better questions of Scripture in our Bible studies, we might get beyond “What does this passage mean to you?” to ask why Peter quotes so much from the Old Testament. Persistence in pursuing clear lines of question, researching, and moving to the next step might get us from milk to meat and make the author of Hebrews happy.
Read MoreI Met Reality While Riding on a Lion
In The Lion’s Country: C. S. Lewis’s Theory of the Real, Charlie Starr wades into deep water with Narnia’s creator. His book helps uncover a unified theme in Lewis’s work, pointing toward the objective moral order of the universe. The book provides some concrete forms for daunting, abstract questions.
Read MoreSlogans: Culture War from a Distance
The power of slogans helps explain why we should not treat casual abortion supporters as if they are mass murderers. Most of them have given very little thought to the brutality of abortion, because slogans have prevented the need to think. As Milton Mayer shows in They Thought They Were Free, people can do some terrible things under the cover of busyness, and cognitive distance slogans provide.
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