The Four: A Survey of the Gospels

Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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Miscellaneous: Defending Constantine

At the right, you’ll find a link to the Amazon page for my forthcoming book on Constantine.  Take a look!

Miscellaneous: Too Much Learning

Josiah Ober (Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens) cites a study by organization theorist James March that shows through case studies of business firm “innovation and learning are potentially contradictory drives: social learning is valuable in that learning allows routinization and routinization increases returns to effort.  But the capacity for innovation, which is essential for success in changing competitive environments, depends on people’s socialization in established routines remaining incomplete.  In volatile environments, too much learning can compromise competitive advantage, as can too little learning when conditions are more predictable.”

Miscellaneous: What Teens Want

Caitlin Flanagan asks in the June issue of The Atlantic why girls are today looking for “the kind of super-reactionary love stories that would have been perfectly at home during the Eisenhower administration?”  Her answer is that teenage behavior is shaped by “the mores and values of the generation (no, the decade) immediately preceding their own.”  Teens want to do something new, but are too young and inexperienced “to make anything new – or even to recognize what might be cliched.”  The only thing they know “is the world they began to take notice of when they turned 12 or 13; all they can imagine doing to put their mark on that world is to either advance or retreat along the lines that were already drawn for them.”

The key moment at Woodstock, she suggests, was when “Sha Na Na took the stage in gold jumpsuits and confused everyone by playing ‘At the Hop.’”  They knew that “right in the middle of Woodstock, the next new thing was already struggling to be born.”  Music set the course, and Hollywood followed: “Only four years after the orgy in the New York mud bath, George Lucas gave the next crop of kids American Graffiti. . . . What else could have followed Woodstock . . . other than a full embrace of the supposedly most sexually boring and intellectually repressed time and place of the 20th century, 1950s America?”

The heart of Flanagan’s review, though, is a sobering meditation on the sexuality of contemporary teenage girls.

Continue reading…

Miscellaneous: Barbie and Mainstreaming Porn

The TLS reviewer of Natasha Walter’s recent Living Dolls notes how pornography “has entered mainstream culture to transform girls into animate versions of the sexist and sexy dolls they embrace in innocent delight.”  Walter points to the effect of Barbie dolls on American girls.  ”When girls aged five to eight played with a Barbie, and were then asked about their own body image, they reported more dissatisfaction and a greater desire to be thin than did girls who had either been playing with a larger doll or who had not been playing with any doll.  Barbie, with her long leg and large breasts, and Bratz, with fishnet stockings, feather boa and up-for-anything attitude, are not ‘just toys’; they indoctrinate girls into the culture of pornography wherein girls are raised not only to be thin and compulsively critical of their own physiques, but also to be ‘babes.’”

Miscellaneous: For all you Lost fans

So.  I picked up a book the other day, The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America, a sprightly narrative about a group of Harvard professors from the 1960s/70s who experimented with hallucinogens by feeding them to students. Timothy Leary was the most famous. They got canned.

One of them went off to India, came under the influence of a Hindu guru, changed his name to Ram Dass, and came back to the States, touring the country and giving lectures on spiritual enlightenment, doing good, supporting charitable causes.  Ram Dass is still alive.

Now, the kicker:

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Miscellaneous: Havin’ fun

Erich Fromm describes the condition of late modern humanity: “well fed, well clad, satisfied sexually, yet without self, without any except the most superficial contact with his fellow men, guided by slogans which Huxley formulated so succinctly, such as: ‘When the individual feels, the community reels’; or, ‘Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today’; or as the crowning statement: ‘Everybody is happy nowadays.’  Man’s happiness consists in ‘having fun.’  Having fun lies in the satisfaction of consuming and ‘taking in’ commodities, sights, foods, drinks, cigarettes, people, lectures, books, movies – all are consumed, swallowed.  The world is one great object for our appetite, a big apple, a big bottle, a big breast; we are the sucklers, the eternally expectant ones, the hopeful ones – and the eternally disappointed ones.”

Miscellaneous: Pitching sales

Amazon says they’ve got my Jane Austen biography in stock.  Click the icon to the right and you’ll get there.

New St Andrews College philosopher Mitch Stokes has a biography of Isaac Newton (Christian Encounters Series) in the same series from Nelson, and it’s in stock at Amazon too.  Check it out.

Miscellaneous: Available on Amazon

As you’ll notice in the icon to the right, my commentary on 1-3 John is now available on Amazon.

Miscellaneous: Research

As you walk away from the stacks, your eye lands on an intriguing title you’ve never heard of and you’ve not been looking for.  It turns out to contain all the crucial information.

Just when you’re hitting transition and the book is just not going to come without a surgical intervention, a book that you don’t remembering ordering arrives in the mail, and it happens to have notches in all the right places.

Someone you barely know who doesn’t know what you’re working on makes an irrelevant and passing, but wholly illuminating, comment.

Tossing in bed at 4 AM, suffering deadline insomnia, an organizing thesis forms in your brain.

Research.  That’s how it’s done.  Like everything else, it’s sheer grace.

Miscellaneous: Tough Languages

According to the Economist, the Estonian language has 14 cases (including inessive, elative, adessive, abessive), “Bora, spoken in Peru, has more than 350″ genders, and the Solomon Island language of Kwaio has an exclusive and inclusive form of “we” and in addition to singular and plural has dual and paucal.

The Kuuk Thaayorre of northern Australia have no words for left and right, but instead use absolute directions: “as in ‘You have an ant on your south-west leg.’”  To “where are you going,” they’ll give answers like “north-north-east, in the middle distance.”

Miscellaneous: Hiawatha photographing

From Lewis Carroll, quoted in Robin Wilson’s delightful Lewis Carroll in Numberland: His Fantastical Mathematical Logical Life:

From his shoulder Hiawatha
Took the camera of rosewood,
Made of sliding, folding rosewood;
Neatly put it all together.
In its case it lay compactly,
Folded into nearly nothing;

But he opened out the hinges,
Pushed and pulled the joints and hinges,
Till it looked all squares and oblongs,
Like a complicated figure
In the Second Book of Euclid.

Continue reading…

Miscellaneous: Canon Sale

Canon Press is having a Fall Sale, which you can read about here: http://www.canonpress.com/shop/

Miscellaneous: Good times

Along with a friend, my son, Jordan, has started an online comic strip.  Check it out here every Tuesday and Thursday: http://www.goodtimescomic.blogspot.com/

Miscellaneous: Logos Software

The folks at Logos Bible Software have included a number of my books in their software.  You can get more information here: http://www.logos.com/products/prepub/details/4582

I’m told that now is a good time to order, since “pre-order prices often rise as we get closer to production” and “the earlier they order, the better the deal.”

Miscellaneous: Outliers

I’ve read several devastating reviews of Malcolm Gladwell’s latest in the past few weeks, but Carol Tavris (TLS, 2/20) takes the prize.  She identifies the main problem with Gladwell’s work as the “except when it doesn’t” problem. She writes,

“the premiss of Outliers: The story of success is that ‘extraordinary’ success depends on culture, circumstances, demographics and chance, except when it also depends on talent, willingness to break rules, imagination and risk-taking.  Success depends on being in the right place at the right time, except for all those other people who were in the same place at the same time and didn’t notice that the time was right.”

Miscellaneous: Jane in limbo

Miscellaneous: NICE

In the UK, they’ve got something called the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence.

CS Lewis called it: There really is an N.I.C.E.

Miscellaneous: Style as proof

In an essay on M. H. Abrams’s Natural Supernaturalism, Wayne Booth praises the style of the book, but more: “I must emphasize that I am not simply praising Abrams’ style.  i am making what I take to be a much more risky claim: that a style that is good in the way Abrams’ style is good not only tends to carry us with him: it ought to.  It carries a legitimate warrant for the author’s theses.  To write well in this way helps prove your case, though of course it cannot go it alone. . . . The fact that if ‘a subject’ – whatever that means – enables a critic to write well about it, without requiring him to rely on easily separable blandishments and charm, the mere production of hundreds of pages of well-written sense about it constitutes as good a test as we have for his these.  If the theses were very weak, we have a right to conclude, a man like Abrams (as implied in his style) would have discovered the weakness as he tried to write honest sentences about them; and if he became dishonest and tried to fake, it would somehow show.”

Miscellaneous: Googled?

Nicholas Carr asks in the July/August issue of the Atlantic whether Google is making us stupid.  He points out that the web tends to scatter attention and diffuse concentration by bringing information from various sources at us all at once.  As the web comes to dominate our access to news and entertainment, other media adjust to become more web-like.  “Never,” he writes, “has a communications system played so many roles in our lives – or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts, as the Internet does today.”

Carr says that re-forming the way we think is a conscious goal of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the two founders of Google.  Brin said in 2004, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.”  Page has said that Google is aiming “to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

Carr isn’t convinced that we’d be better off if our brains were “supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence.”   He challenges the underlying view that “intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized.  In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation.  Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed.  The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.”

Miscellaneous: Full Frontal Phrenology

When Hillary and W. got to college, both had posture photos taken, nude or in underwear.  So says M. F. Burnyeat in the May 16 TLS.

Burnyeat adds, “Officially, the idea was that the pictures would reveal which students needed remedial treatment for poor posture.  In reality, the project was to correlate the students’ undergraduate posture with their success or failure in later life.  As the evidece accumulated, it would become possible to predict the Presidential chances of each year’s intake. . . . Professor W. H. Sheldon of Columbia University, the eminence grise behind these programmes, was eventually disgraced and his research abandoned.  The ultimate inspiration had been Francis Galton, the eugenicist founder of Social Darwinism, who proposed a similar photo archive for the entire British population.”

Not that Burnyeat has seen the pictures.  But he did have the story confirmed by three friends who attended Ivy League schools at the time.

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