Category: Books
How to be an Evangelical Influencer (Apparently)
Endorse a book you didn’t actually read. Capitulate to a Twitter mob demanding you retract your endorsement for the book that you didn’t actually read. Call the book’s argument, which is almost identical to things you’ve said in your own...
Reading Ratzinger
Luke has written an obit for the Pope Emeritus over on the main site. So I have little to add to that. I may have something further to say related to Benedict’s passing later, but for now I’m curious to...
Gray on Sociology
Gray: If Positivism is the chief source of the twentieth century’s most powerful secular religions it is partly through its impact on the social sciences. For Positivists, modernity is the transformation of the world by the use of scientific knowledge....
Schaeffer’s Legacy
I am a former L’Abri student. Every time I visit Rochester, MN, I make a point of visiting Dr. Schaeffer’s grave. He’s something of a spiritual grandfather to me. My most treasured book in my home library is a copy...
CS Lewis on Political Idolatries
From Screwtape Letters: Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of the partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and...
Reading the Pan-Africanists: Julius Nyerere (II)
Continuing: The production of wealth, whether by primitive or modern methods, requires three things. First, land. God has given us the land, and it is from the land that we get the raw materials which we reshape to meet our...
Positivism and Universal Free Markets
Gray: The core of Logical Positivism was the development of a scientific worldview. Going further than Saint-Simon and Comte, the Logical Positivists declared that only the verifiable propositions of science have meaning: strictly speaking, religion, metaphysics and morality are nonsense....
Gray and the Deeply Modern Bolsheviks
John Gray: The roots of the Soviet system were in the Enlightenment’s most utopian dreams. Lenin never gave up the belief that, after a period of revolutionary terror, the state would be abolished. Trotsky defended the taking and killing of...
Reading “Non-Anxious Presence” (II)
Before getting into more prescriptive analysis in his later chapters, Sayers spends the first chapter developing his concept of a “gray zone.” To begin, The pandemic, cultural change, political polarization, and technological disruption have rapidly altered the world we live...
Reading the Pan-Africanists: Julian Nyerere (I)
I’ve finished Kaunda. Now on to Nyerere, a contemporary of Kaunda’s who was the first president of Tanzania, serving from 1964 to 1985. I’m reading his book Socialism, which is a collection of addresses and papers he wrote in the early...