Psalm 68 is not just a run-of-the-mill imprecatory psalm. It combines "smite my enemy" prayers with the "God is a warrior" motif, and the result is a vision of God's wrath and judgment that sounds more like Beowulf or Conan the Barbarian than any other part of the Bible. I say this advisedly, because back when I was a teen-age consumer of Barbarian sword-and-sorcery stories (a...
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Every day the company screwed with its employees.
They told us they would and even laughed about it.
You see I worked (ever so briefly) for a company that made metal fasteners, including screws. The puns cannot all be repeated here, but never varied much.
Working in that plant, along with summers spent as a painter, taught me as much as any given semester of gradua...
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I do love the ESV translation, and all its digital manifestations have helped it take over my Bible study. But here's a tweak to recommend: the in-line references at the ESV website are too big and too dark. The extra letters keep catching my eye, resulting in the formation of crazy words.
Sounds like Scooby Doo blasphemy. Zoinks!
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No Christian should ever have a least favorite book of the Bible. All Scripture is God-breathed, and the whole Bible in all its parts is good for teaching, training, and equipping us. But it is perfectly permissible, and even desirable, to have a favorite book of the Bible. It could be the book that first reached us with the good news of salvation, or one through which God spok...
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Featured Essay
I’ve spent much of this week talking with students about Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man). We don’t lecture in the Torrey Honors Institute; we discuss. To start off a class, we try and develop a crafty question, one that immediately sets the students before an issue at the heart of the text in a way that provokes, stimulates, hooks them into discussing the boo...
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The caption under it says "Violin Player by Clara Crampton (The artist has been blind since birth.) You need not rely on the eyes alone."
It's an illustration on page 7 of The Natural Way to Draw by Kimon Nicolaides (first published 1941). Nicolaides' Natural Way was nigh canonical at the college where I studied drawing. His remarks on how to combine what the eye sees with ...
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Featured Essay
The tenth anniversary of 9/11 is over and memories can be put away for at least one more year. Most are self-centered and 9/11 forced those of us old enough to pull out of our personal lives and recognize that some things are bigger than we are.
Other people’s pains, other people’s courage, and other people’s pain were more important on 9/11 than anything happening to...
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Here is a hymn Charles Wesley wrote about work. Like nearly all Wesley hymns, it's tightly woven together with Scripture-allusion. It has simpler diction than many of Wesley's hymns, because it was written for children. Actually, it was written for the orphans in the orphanage founded by George Whitefield in Georgia, for them to sing and meditate on "Before Their Going to Work....
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Sitting in Sunday School as a kid, Mrs. Her Name Is Hard to Recall told me the "fear of the Lord" was reverential awe for God, not being scared.
Slouching in Bible College waiting to be kicked out, Dr. I Will Protect His Identity told me this answer was inadequate and overly soft. He proceeded to expound at some depth on the idea of the fear of the Lord.
Much later as a philo...
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It's one thing to be forgiven, and another thing to be born again. Both happen at once, but they are distinct from each other. They have to be distinguished clearly, in order to be united perfectly. It's hard to know whether it's more important to distinguish them, or to insist that they go together. John Wesley may have been the most successful at distinguishing and uniting th...
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Just after three pm on February 3, 1691, a little boy was whittling on a piece of wood outside his house, when a raven landed on the steeple of the nearby church and said to him, "Look into Colossians 3:15."
The raven said this three times.
So the boy, obedient lad that he was, went inside and told his grandparents to look up that passage. What they found there was the m...
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Mr. Coulombe's latest offering on Taki's Magazine takes as its starting point the recent bill signed into law by our "undead" governor and moves on to explore a more fundamental issue about illegal immigration: the culture of "self-indulgence and sloth" espoused by the Anglo elite. In the words of the new Archbishop of Los Angeles: “We have an elite culture—in government, ...
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