Postcards from Palookaville

Help, is there anybody out there??? Please, please come to rescue me. I've now been held by Tony `the Gent' and his boys for three weeks in some underground location. Will somebody please try to find me and rescue me? I can't give you a precise location -- occasionally I hear voices in a room above...

Trapped in the basement, I have no access to news. I assume Delboy's bragging means England are out of the World Cup. Still, I'm a grammar school boy so the emotional trauma is limited-- rugby's the only true ball game worth playing or watching. In the meantime I note the Tour de France has been...

Trapped in the basement, I have no access to news. I assume Delboy's bragging means England are out of the World Cup. Still, I'm a grammar school boy so the emotional trauma is limited-- rugby's the only true ball game worth playing or watching. In the meantime I note the Tour de France has been...

One of the striking things about Daniel Block’s new book, For the Glory of God , is that it assumes throughout that most basic and often neglected of truths: the church is a creation and an act of God’s grace, not our response to his grace. In the strictest sense, we do not do church;...

Over at his blog, Jesus Creed, New Testament scholar Scot McKnight offers some interesting reflections on the neglected topic of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's attitude to the work of Rudolf Bultmann. The post is interesting for a number of reasons. First, it highlights the complexity of categorizing...

The Roman Catholics may have had a Popessa , but here at the HQ of the Irascible, Reconditioned and Replaceable, we have our own Iron Lady who rules with a cold and ruthless fist in the name of Puppet Master. No, not La Diva, but the Mad Woman in the Attic whose long, sinister shadow can be felt...

In answering Todd's question about growing as a preacher, I offer the following thoughts in no particular order of priority: 1. An increasing grasp of the theological significance of the act of preaching. Too many in the Reformed world seem to make no distinction between preaching and lecturing...

The news was buzzing yesterday with stories of the apparent infringement of religious freedom in Houston. Ed Whelan offered a report on events in the National Review Online and Mark Movsesian today provided a characteristically nuanced legal account at First Thoughts , which corrects some of the...

La Diva's question about evangelicalism and sentimentality is an important one but I would like to expand its reference by pointing to the close connection between sentimentality and aesthetics. We live in an age where matters of taste, defined often by emotional, sentimental reactions, are...

A couple of weeks ago, I commended Dan Block's excellent book on worship and commented that it was one of the only things of which I was aware that addressed the public reading of scripture in a clear and practical manner. TeamPyro's Disco Dan promptly drew my attention to the fact that he...