How should a theologian respond to a popular book that includes unsound teaching? The popular book I'm thinking of is The Shack, by William P. Young. After getting dozens of questions about The Shack, I wrote a review of it in early 2009. Actually, I wrote five reviews of it, in five different voices, partly so nobody could accuse me of not understanding that IT'S JUST A STORY...
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And here is the epic conclusion to my sleep-talking adventures from graduate school. (Click here for installments 1, 2, and 3.)
I'm sure I still talk in my sleep, but probably not as much as back in the day. During the time my wife took these notes, I was reading assigned theology all day every day, staying up late into the night, and hating to get out of bed. At any rate, t...
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Installment 3 of 4 in this series of transcripts of my sleep-talking adventures from the late 90s. No, I cannot explain most of these.
***
Something about a surgeon
Getting ready to cut something out of someone
[who?]
Part of the time it was me.
Part of the time it was some guy I didn’t know.
[Is he a good surgeon?]
Yes.
***
Some motivational speaker.
He’...
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Transcript 2 of 4 in the annals of the sleep-talkin' theologian. These notes date from about 1997. My long-suffering wife, a morning person, asks me questions like "when do you want to wake up?" and "what are you dreaming about?" Still asleep, I answer her questions. Sometimes she interjects ideas into my dreams, and I accept them. She's especially fond of lobbing kittens in.
...
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There's a man in England, Adam Lennard, who talks in his sleep. He speaks very clearly, says truly bizarre things, and is recorded by his wife's voice-activated digital recorder. His wife has begun blogging his nightly oracles, and their blog is suddenly the Next Big Thing: millions of readers, interviews on talk shows, merchandise, the whole viral internet treatment. Check out...
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Taipei 101 skyscraper, modeled on the shape of bamboo
Today is the last day of my two-week stay in Taiwan, visiting relatives. Taiwan is often overlooked by Westerners in favor of China. My mother is from China and my father is from Taiwan, but I want to argue that Taiwan is more Chinese than China. If you want to experience China at its fullest, go to Taiwan, not China!
...
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To follow up Fred Sanders' review of my book I have posted a short excerpt from Education for Human Flourishing published by IVP Academic.
The passage below describes the difference between rhetoric and knowledge, and how important it is for us to be able to distinguish between the two.
Rhetoric Versus Knowledge
It is easy to feel defeated and confused given daily cultur...
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The greatest works of Martin Luther King, Jr. are the "I have a dream" sermon and the "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." These are MLK at his best, when his preparation and his personal struggles lined up providentially with the turbulent events of the civil rights movement, and he found all the right words to say what needed to be said. Take up and read.
But King also produc...
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The Constitution of 1789 and republican values.
Ronald Reagan and tax cuts.
Orthodoxy and icons.
Some things go together naturally and pizza and NFL play-off football are two naturals. Over the course of my life no pizza was more guaranteed to disappoint than Domino's. It was as fake as Ben Nelson's hair. If you saw the box at a pizza party, you went for any other foot...
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In one sense, portraying the Holy Spirit in baptism icons is not a problem at all: the Spirit descended in the form of a dove. The iconographer does not need to try to get behind this simple assertion of the New Testament to ask "why a dove?" For the most part, painters just seem grateful to have been given a concrete, visible way of depicting this most mysterious and elusive...
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Ignorance allows certainty, but punishes with narrowness. Ignorance grants ease of mind, but produces costly errors.
No place is this more evident in American culture than in those ignorant of Christianity. They think they know what Christians believe, but do not. They cheerfully dismiss with almost no thought serious truth claims made by religious thinkers. They revel in th...
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In 1750, after two earthquakes hit England, Charles Wesley wrote two small volumes of hymns on earthquakes. It is not too much to say that he developed a whole theology of earthquakes, in song. They answer the question, when a believer's country is struck by such a disaster, what should that believer say, or sing, to God?
Here is hymn #5 from the first collection.
Go...
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