Welcome to the online home of Tim Challies, blogger, author, and book reviewer.
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I have benefited a lot from Greg Koukl’s books Tactics and The Story of Reality. And while I have undoubtedly forgotten much of their content, there are a number of takeaways that have stuck with me. The foremost is that when we speak to people who are not Christians, we have not failed if they make no profession of faith in Jesus Christ. While that may be our ultimate desire for them, a good and noble goal for any spiritual …
Every now and again I sit down to write a review for a book and realize I am really under-equipped to review it well. I might have read it, enjoyed it, and benefitted from it, but lack the knowledge or expertise to confidently analyze it. This is exactly the case with Andrew Wilson’s Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West. The book’s big idea is that the year “1776, more than any other year in the last millennium, …
Has anyone ever lived in times that were normal? Probably not, I suppose. Every time and every context has its peculiarities, I’m sure. Regardless, there’s no doubt that we are currently living in unusual times—in what seems like a transitionary phase during which old traditions, old morals, and old ways of understanding the world are giving way to new. There are new questions, new concerns, and new challenges to those who want to live well in a world like this …
When I enrolled in university, I quickly learned that it was considered wise to take one or two “bird courses” as they were called back then—courses that were known to be an easy credit. These would counter-balance the much more difficult courses I was taking like Greek and French. One of the easy options was “comparative religion.” Though it did turn out to be an easy credit, it also proved to be a near-complete waste of time. The professor didn’t …
Though we fear it, we must all face it. Though we hate it, we must all meet it. Though we dread it, we cannot avoid it. It is, of course, death. In this broken and battered world, death always looms over life, death always stands hauntingly in the distance. Death is the subject of a new book by Guy Prentiss Waters. Facing the Last Enemy is meant to acquaint Christians with death so they might think about it rightly and …
Sometimes a book obscures its subject behind a clever or even misleading title. Sometimes, though, it just goes out and says it. And that’s very much the case with Bob Fyall’s Why Are We Often So Boring?. Having dedicated his life to both preaching and training others to preach, he has collected his thoughts and reflections in this small but punchy book. His concern, of course, is that too much preaching is boring. Yet he is not lobbying for preaching …
It is no small feat to build a strong marriage. It is no easy thing to maintain a strong marriage through years of trials and temptations, through decades of sinning and being sinned against. It is not something any of us can take for granted and it is for this reason that there are so many resources available to help marriages start well and continue well. New to store shelves is Bob Lepine’s Build a Stronger Marriage: The Path to …
I am often asked how I read so many books. My pat answer is something like this: “The more you read, the easier it gets. When you’ve read 8 books on marriage, the 9th goes really quickly.” The point is that there is a kind of sameness to Christian publishing where books tend to focus on the same themes, exposit the same passages, quote the same authors, and in the end say roughly the same things. It’s awfully refreshing, then, …
At the end of the Second World War the Allied nations began to “denazify” Germany. After the final surrender, they began the long process of identifying Nazis and uprooting the influence of Nazism across all of society—in culture, media, economics, and politics. The goal was to create a Germany that was post-Hitler and, therefore, post-Nazi. It seems to me that in the West today we are witnessing an attempt to “dechristianize” our society—to identify and destroy the influence of Christianity …
Do you remember the purity movement? Or perhaps it’s better to ask this: How could you possibly forget the purity movement? Though in many ways its aims were noble—sexual purity among teens and young adults—its methods were more than a little suspect and, in the long run, often even harmful. It framed sexual purity as a method that would gain a spouse rather than as obedience that would honor God; it led people to believe that those who had lost …