A wise father gives good advice to his children.

My oldest joins the scores of Torrey Honors students who have spent a semester taking classes in the excellent Coalition of Christian Colleges and Universities exchange program in Oxford. As a good father, I have tried to do research in order to give my son and any other current or future Biola student at Oxford advice on how to handle their academic careers this term. (more…)

I don’t know whether to blame fairy tales or Oliver Twist. I was reading Exodus 16 and ran into the passage where God commanded the people of Israel to go gather manna. Immediately childhood images from David C. Cook’s Pix and Uncle Arthur came into my head.

I knew the lesson I should learn: don’t take too much manna or it will be full of worms. The applications were endless: kids who eat too much candy on Halloween throw up, people who eat too much over Thanksgiving have a harder week at the gym, and people who think every great book should be as enjoyable as C.S. Lewis will remain ignorant.

Fairy tales make this obvious: pain before pleasure. You cannot find a hero who gets to skip from once upon a time to happily ever after without facing some dragonish problems. Don’t wish for more wishes in Dungeons and Dragons or the malicious DM will put you in a time look wishing for more wishes. If you are with Abu in the Cave of Wonders make sure that he does not touch any extra treasure or you might have to burn a wish to get out.
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Or, Living Supernaturally Without Being a Wizard

What is a poor Muggle to do?

Muggles lack magic, J.K. Rowling tells me, and there is no doubt I am a muggle. My students are Muggles too, but worst of all instead of Dumbledore in class, they get me. Sometimes I get on the elevator in my two-story building and hope that it will open to Narnia, but it always opens to the carpet stains on the polyester floor.

We are warned against magical thinking as a solution to our cultural problems and it is a good warning. I have known a few people who try to live magically and they ended up either deluded or wicked. Thinking magically didn’t get these folk to Narnia, but looks like it might get them to bankruptcy, the psych center, or Hell.

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Reflections after reading Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Slavery was the original American sin.

I don’t know anyone who justifies race-based slavery, but I have known seemingly good folk with more than a dollop of sympathy for the Confederacy. Growing centralized government makes “states’ rights” look good, and self-determination is a popular modern cause.

If the South wanted to be free, why use brutal force to bring it back within the Union?

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I get tired, and I know I’m not alone. We are tired of all we do. We are weary of words. There are so many of them. When I think of writing anything, but am wary of words, I get tired. How can I write on a topic without presumption that has been covered so many times by so many skillful people?

Perhaps, just perhaps, hope can be found in our weariness. Being hungry does not prove there is food to eat, but does give hope that there was once food. My weariness of words and my failure to communicate gives hope that, perhaps, there was once real communication and rest. (more…)

I have decided to list the books that changed my life . . . not the best books I have read. How to get on the list? First, I have read it more than ten times. Second, I can see the cover of my first copy in my mind’s eye. Third, it is a book I have carried to an event that had nothing to do with the book. Fourth, I sometimes quote it by acccident. These are not all great books, or even good books, but at some time in my life they moved me to action.

1. The Bible

I don’t remember a time when the stories of this book were not being read to me and I read it every day. My parents raised me in an atmosphere super-saturated with this Book of Books.

2. That Hideous Strength (C.S. Lewis)

Torrey is based on the image of Saint Anne’s in this book. This is the truest account of the state of the West written in the last one hundred years. I have read it every year since I was ten (or so).

3. Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien)

I have read this book every year of my life since seventh grade. Even the smallest hobbit can do great things for God.

4. Republic (Plato)

The two years spent with this book and Al Geier were the most academically productive of my life. Since then, I have come to find almost every truth needed in the pages of this book, saving only the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ.

5. Nicholas and Alexandra (Massie)

This book seized my imagination and still makes me cry.

6. A Severe Mercy (Vanauken)

My favorite book on love, marriage, and the problem of pain.

7. Chronicles of Narnia (Lewis)

I still hope the elevator in Sutherland (my college building) will open to Narnia someday.

8. Divine Comedy (Dante)

The most influential book of the last four years of my life.

9. Timaeus (Plato)

This is the first and last word on science for me.

10. Reason in the Balance (Johnson)

The book that still shapes the educational experience at Torrey.

I have quite a few bad habits, but here is one that can be told on this blog and not just in the confessional: I sometimes use too many adjectives.

This week I was reminded of this problem when I became irritated with a description on this blog of a political commentator as a Mormon. “What in the world does his Mormonism have to do with anything? Isn’t the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints exceptionally generous to the poor? ” I thought. It reminded me of people who put “extreme right” in front of everything a Republican says or use “teabagging” as a description of a senator. (more…)

Some critics of Intelligent Design conflate the movement with creationism. Of course forms of Intelligent Design can be creationist, but arguably others (like that of Aristotle on some readings of the philosopher) are not. I am both a creationist and one who believes there exists evidence for Intelligent Design in nature. (more…)

There are shows that died before their time, such as Firefly. There were certainly shows that suffered from a lack of love and budget cuts, see the third season of Star Trek: The Only Non-Derivative Version.  (more…)

One thing critics of ancient cultures often miss is how easy “freedom” and “liberty” were to achieve in the ancient world and how hard order was to maintain.

One could curse the king easily in the ancient world with almost no chance the king would ever hear of it! Any society was just a few bad harvests from chaos.

Ancient cultures tended to develop rules, for good reasons, that emphasized justice and good order, because in those times order was harder to maintain.

Technology helped the central power . . . and has made order easier to maintain. I would argue it has made it too easy! As a result modern thinkers began to emphasize keeping the central government out of our lives. The king could do things in a modern context that ancient kings could do in theory . . . but never in practice!

So one reason “liberty” is less emphasized in any ancient text is that “order” was often a bigger priority . . . and harder to abuse.

This is a brief response to my critics, mostly Frank Turk.

I think the heart of our disagreement is the Bible and how to read it. I think the Bible is true and binding on a Christian. If it says a thing, we must do it.

Sadly, reading a book is not as easy as one might think. The Bible was written to a particular people and time . . . and has to be contextualized to be understood. When it comes to salvation, the news is good: we get it. “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ” and we are saved.

Even then, of course, understanding what it means to “believe” can be difficult!

When the Bible gives economic advice, things get trickier. For many of us the advice to own goats for milk would be counterproductive. We don’t get our clothes from lambs. Most of us have no problem with this, we contextualize the advice.

Proverbs warns about being lazy, but the signs of laziness in a farm based culture are not exactly the same as those in “word” based culture like our own. You can do a good bit of work from bed in our day!

My view of the forms of government described in the Bible follows this pattern. The Bible gives us no sanctified form of government for this life. The government God established on Mount Sinai was for that people, at that place, at that time. Some laws were as shadows for the rest of us (dietary laws) to teach deeper theological truths and have no relevance to me today. (I can eat ham!) Other laws were the best that could be sustained in poor and nomadic cultures. Our much richer and non-nomadic culture can, for example, establish prisons.

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