A La Carte (May 6)

Sales & Deals

Today’s Kindle deals include several interesting options (as always)!

Over at Westminster Books, you’ll find a great deal on my favorite church history series.

Recommended Reading

Eugenics as Self-Loathing. It is early in the month, so you probably haven’t used up your monthly allotment of free articles from First Things. This article about eugenics as self-loathing would be worth one of them. “A great deal of what circulates online as eugenic ideology is simply depression wearing a lab coat. It is self-loathing that has graduated from the personal to the philosophical, that has found a way to universalize its private verdict of worthlessness. If I should not exist, then surely others like me should not exist either. The conclusion may sound scientific, but the premise is despair.”

Raise Kids to Be Reality Respecters. This is a helpful thought from Betsy Childs Howard. “If we believe God made the world and our children, we’ll teach them that the only way to be in touch with reality is to look at the world the way God looks at it. As a believing parent, I have a duty to teach my children to question whether their feelings fit the way things are.”

The Pastoral Virtue of Avoidance. “At least seven times in the pastoral epistles, Paul directly charges Timothy and Titus to ‘avoid’ and to ‘have nothing to do with’ ideas and people who pose a threat to their flock.” This article considers what is involved in this pastoral virtue of avoidance.

Live Son or Dead Daughter? Alan Shlemon: “There’s one question that would stop a parent in their tracks: ‘Would you rather have a live son or a dead daughter?’ In other words, would you rather help your daughter ‘transition’ to a boy or have her kill herself? That’s the calculus being imposed on some parents. It’s a simple, visceral, and impossible question to answer without responding the way transgender advocates want. Push back even slightly, and you’re branded a monster.”

On the Complexity of Evaluating Cultural Christianity. Many people today are processing cultural Christianity and considering whether it is a good or a bad thing. Casey McCall has had to do that as someone who grew up in the heart of it. “I grew up in the Bible Belt. In fact, I often say that my birthplace in South Alabama might be the prong of the buckle of the Bible Belt. Flannery O’Connor once described my region of the world as ‘Christ-haunted.’ A southerner may not follow Jesus, but he’s probably thought a lot about it. It’s hard to escape his influence in the South where residents drive by old impressive brick churches on every main corner and see new ones popping up continually in dilapidated strip malls.”

The Sin We’ve Stopped Taking Seriously. Trevin Wax says he is “convinced we don’t take pride seriously as a sin—either in ourselves or in others. We live in a world overflowing with self-promotion, where arrogance is reframed as swagger and narcissism passes for self-confidence. We have lifted up leaders whose egos are so massive we no longer flinch at their self-aggrandizement. Boasting marks our culture today. It’s now normal.”

My Only Answer

I have often appreciated these words of pastoral encouragement from Theodore Cuyler.

To all my readers who are wondering why a loving God has subjected them so often to the furnace, my only answer is that God owns you and me, and He has a right to do with us just as He pleases. If He wants to keep His silver over a hot flame until He can see His own countenance reflected in the metal, then He has a right to do so. It is the Lord, it is my loving Teacher, it is my Heavenly Father; let Him do what seemeth Him good. He will not lay on one stroke in cruelty, or a single one that He cannot give me grace to bear. Life’s schooldays and nights will soon be over. Pruning-time will soon be ended. The crucibles will not be needed in heaven.

Flashback

Do You Practice? We must learn to practice love in the little moments of life, in the small things, in ways that may go unseen and unnoticed.