Finished reading: A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L’Engle 📚
@hobbsandbean told me that this would be my favorite of the series, but I also needed to read the first two before this, the third. I did like it, actually. I can look past the bent toward open theism with the “might-have-been”s. I mean, I’ve seen Back to the Future so I know that traveling back in time can change things in the present. :)
It also happened that I actually read this book unlike A Wrinkle in Time and Wind in the Door, which I listened to. I have nothing against peeps that benefit from, even prefer, audiobooks, but reading works better for me.
4 of 5 stars
I like guitar, I like Classical Gas, I liked this edition.
What He's Prepared
Counting Waves
The Blessing of Being Lied About
Here’s a good question for considering how to bless others: Is what I’m doing making it easier for them to give thanks to the Lord?
5 of 5 stars to Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear
Not the Sanctimonious Sisterhood of Bossy Pants
Walking among the Lampstands
In A Centennial Reader, James Bratt introduces Abraham Kuyper’s inaugural address for the Free University of Amsterdam, and why opening this institution was so important for Kuyper:
❝Higher education and advanced research had enormous importance for him: religiously, for exploring and enhancing God’s creation; strategically, for (re)shaping society and culture; socially, for raising the self-respect and life-chances of common people.”
On reading doctrinal books rather than devotional books for sake of deepening devotion:
❝For my own part I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await many others. I believe that many who find that ‘nothing happens’ when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that their heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.”
—C.S. Lewis, Preface to On the Incarnation
Keeping the Adjective
Perhaps my favorite Preface of all time is that by C.S. Lewis for On the Incarnation by Athanasius. Here’s an example, on why we should read old books:
❝Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.”
A Bellyaching Bucket
This is an interesting take on three approaches that Christians take to culture, in particular, to Western society. I haven’t spent much time among self-identified capitulators, nor for that matter among the warriors. I have spent most of my life among the reconcilers, as defined by this article, though those most of those guys would not identify themselves as such. I think the reason for that is because many of these orthodox Evangelicals are fighting, and their claim is not untrue. They are fighting the spiritual war, at least as they understand it and for which there is a kind of biblical defense (i.e., Ephesians 6:10-20; 2 Corinthians 10:3-5). They are fighting against capitulators in the church (those who “affirm with their generous overlords the unworthiness of conservative evangelicals to be tolerated”), and they are fighting against sin in souls by proclaiming the cross. Calling them reconcilers is not quite accurate, though I can see from Wolfe’s perspective how he tags them as such.
The whole article is worth your time to read, and it provides an opportunity to consider what sphere(s) a faithful disciple of Christ should seek (and expect?) to influence. It’s connected to our Kuyperian-sized blind spot. I do agree that our goal should not be to make ourselves “harmless to the regime.” Jesus is Lord.
The kind of preacher to aspire to be, as Augustine confessed to the Lord about Ambrose:
❝His gifted tongue never tired of dispensing the richness of your corn, the joy of your oil, and the sober intoxication of your wine.”
No Greater Harbor
Because sin darkens the minds of unbelivers (Ephesians 4:18), does that mean that they can’t discover any true things in science?
❝No, the real darkening of sin is found in something completely different, in our having lost the gift to comprehend the true context, the proper coherence, the systematic unity of things. We now view things just outwardly, not in core and essence; hence also, each thing individually, not things together in their connection and origin in God.”
—Abraham Kuyper, “Common Grace in Science,” A Centennial Reader
Don't Forget That
Loving our kids and teaching them to respect life has consequences.
“If you pray for Roe to be overturned, and for the issue to be returned to the states, you are praying for the eventual crack-up of the 50 state union. It may happen with a whimper or a bang, but one thing is sure and certain. Respect for life and love of death are incompossibilities. We cannot vote them into a mutual respect and acceptance any more than we can vote to have water flow uphill.”
—Douglas Wilson, The UnRoeveling of America