Yesterday evening, Boeing rolled out their next generation airliner, the 787 “Dreamliner.” A high-tech, mid-sized, wide-body, twin engine jet airliner, the Dreamliner is being hailed as a great technological innovation, primarily for its use of composite materials. These materials make for a much lighter aircraft which in turn leads to significant fuel savings and allows…
A couple of nights ago I received the second endorsement for The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment. As I mentioned the first time an endorsement came in, I will continue to share these because, in many ways, I feel that this book was a community effort as readers of the site prayed for me, encouraged me,…
A recent article at Psychology Today is getting a lot of attention. I noticed it at a couple of blogs and then saw it come across the wire at Digg, so it is being widely read. The article offers “Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature.” In the preamble the authors, Alan S. Miller and…
Several weeks ago I completed a brief project building a website for a church called Jacob’s Well, an upcoming church plant in Middlesex County, New Jersey and a part of the Acts 29 Network. As I was building the site I didn’t think much of the name, of its origin or its important. That changed,…
Last night in the news I caught a headline titled something like “Eltron Rocks Royal Tantrum.” It seems that Elton John, having just arrived at a concert venue where he was scheduled to sing before a live audience of tens of thousands and a televised audience in the millions, had his car stopped about fifty…
While July 1 is Canada Day, the nation actually seems to take July 2 to remember the birth of our nation. All the stores were open yesterday and are closed today. So today seemed like a good time to thinking about the day. I do not have a lot of customs on this site, but…
It looks like Evan Almighty is sinking. Thought by some to be a sure-thing summer blockbuster, it garnered some glowing reviews in the Christian media but only lukewarm reviews in the mainstream. With other, better family fare now on the big screen (think Ratatouille which has opened to rave reviews), Evan Almighty is going to…
The term hyper-Calvinist is often used as a pejorative. Almost any Calvinist who adheres to the doctrines of grace is likely to be considered a hyper-Calvinist by at least someone. Frankly speaking, a hyper-Calvinist can be any Calvinist to a person who doesn’t understand Calvinism. So today, just briefly, and because the term has come…
This isn’t a book review. Though I often refer to a particular book, I mean this more as a series of statements on intelligent design. The concept of intelligent design has undeniable appeal. Forming a kind of middle ground between creationism and evolution, it claims to reconcile the claims of modern science with what seems…
As mentioned in an earlier post, I read through Lou Priolo’s book Pleasing People last week. This was a book that just showed up in my mailbox. It is not one I would have chosen and even after I pulled it out of the box and set it in my “to read” bookcase I didn’t…
Yesterday the Resurgence blog posted an article by Greg Wright, a writer and film critic. The article was titled “Movies, Morality, and Ratings: A Hard Look at Our Opinion of Films.” He begins like this: Consider this graphic Hollywood plotline: A man travels to Las Vegas to retrieve his cheating wife. On the way back…
I’ve been working my way through Lou Priolo’s new book Pleasing People and it has given me a lot to think about. I don’t know that any of us are readily willing to admit that we are eager to be people pleasers but Priolo shows in this book just how prone we are all to…
Every year, when summer approaches, we begin to hear about summer reading lists. I am uncertain if this is a throwback to days gone by or if people really do try to set aside a few books to read over the course of a summer. Or perhaps it is only students who do this as…
Over the weekend a member of a mailing list I subscribe to asked an interesting question. Reflecting both on some of the highly-publicized “defections” of former Protestants to Roman Catholicism and some he has witnessed personally he asked “What is the appeal of Roman Catholicism?” I have sometimes wondered the same. Why is it that…
A week from today, the movie Evan Almighty will hit theaters across the continent. A projected summer blockbuster, it is the sequel to 2003’s hit comedy Bruce Almighty which starred Jim Carrey and pulled in over $200,000,000 at the box office. Evan Almighty is, I believe, the most expensive comedy ever made with a budget…
By all accounts it would seem that evangelicalism is currently in the midst of a resurgence of interest in Reformed theology. At conferences and in publications all sorts of people are noting the growing interest in Calvinistic theology, especially (though certainly not exclusively) among younger people. Collin Hansen captured some of this interest in an…
A couple of weeks ago I preached for the first time after the elders at my church were kind enough to ask me if I’d like to contribute to a series called “God’s Sovereign Saving Grace.” This was a series on the Doctrines of Grace that has spanned a few month’s worth of Sunday nights.…
I mentioned last week that I had received the first endorsement for The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment, or TDoSD if you were trying to decipher the headline, (which, to remind you, should be available on January 7 of next year). A few weeks ago the manuscript was sent to a handful of authors, teachers and…
Road hockey is a long-standing Canadian tradition–so much so that we invented the word “shinny” to describe the informal games that are played on driveways, roads and parking lots across the nation. It seems that today’s youth generally prefers to play hockey on the Playstation and it is becoming more and more rare to see…
I have done a lot of reading lately and am preparing a bunch of book reviews for the next couple of weeks. I thought it might prove an amusing distraction to select a brief quote from each, provide you the titles to the book, and see if you can match them up. Or even just…