Around and About
January 21, 2014
If you are trapped inside in the snow and have read all the Danielle Steel on the bookshelves and stoked the fire with a few end time novels, here are a few other places which might provide food for thought.
Banner of Truth has a couple of new videos where Mark Johnston and Ian Hamilton talk about some aspects of the publishing work of the Trust. Think Thomas Goodwin and Samuel Rutherford being directed in a movie by John Cassavetes with a budget provided by Hetty Green in a bad mood.
Tim Challies reviews a book by Ref21 regular, Rob Ventura, on spiritual warfare.
And, in case you missed it, Lutheran thinker, Gene Veith, has an interesting piece on the arrival of formal liturgy in an unlikely place which he thinks may be a watershed for evangelicalism. An excellent piece, it still leaves me wondering if too many are not still mesmerised by the reification of "evangelicalism' which seems to be whatever anyone wishes to make it and to exist mainly as the unquestioned foundation of loose affiliations which make up parachurch groupings. If David Wells is right in his new book that forms of worship and content of theology are not neatly and cleanly separable (to which me might also add polity and forms of pastoral care, to name but two), then, whatever theological doctrines "evangelicals" hold in common, to hypothesize a coherent, reified entity such as "evangelicalism' without the addition of significant adjectives as
qualifications, seems a bit of a stretch and of interest only to those who have, well, a vested interest in claiming that it does exist (and, usually, that they should be in charge of it and its various institutions).
Banner of Truth has a couple of new videos where Mark Johnston and Ian Hamilton talk about some aspects of the publishing work of the Trust. Think Thomas Goodwin and Samuel Rutherford being directed in a movie by John Cassavetes with a budget provided by Hetty Green in a bad mood.
Tim Challies reviews a book by Ref21 regular, Rob Ventura, on spiritual warfare.
And, in case you missed it, Lutheran thinker, Gene Veith, has an interesting piece on the arrival of formal liturgy in an unlikely place which he thinks may be a watershed for evangelicalism. An excellent piece, it still leaves me wondering if too many are not still mesmerised by the reification of "evangelicalism' which seems to be whatever anyone wishes to make it and to exist mainly as the unquestioned foundation of loose affiliations which make up parachurch groupings. If David Wells is right in his new book that forms of worship and content of theology are not neatly and cleanly separable (to which me might also add polity and forms of pastoral care, to name but two), then, whatever theological doctrines "evangelicals" hold in common, to hypothesize a coherent, reified entity such as "evangelicalism' without the addition of significant adjectives as
qualifications, seems a bit of a stretch and of interest only to those who have, well, a vested interest in claiming that it does exist (and, usually, that they should be in charge of it and its various institutions). 
