My friend, Mark, blessed me with a wonderful coffee table book that celebrates one of my passions (and guilty pleasures): cognac. Cognac: A Liquid History is a lush, glossy work by a collector and connoisseur, recounting the history of the spirit and providing an overview of 30 houses, along with vintage notes. But it made…
One of my speaking engagements that I’m particularly anticipating for next year is the 2nd annual meeting of the Society of Vineyard Scholars, February 3-5, 2011 in Seattle. The SVS is an exciting new development in a stream of charismatic Christianity that is seeking to encourage faithful, critical reflection for the sake of the kingdom….
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned Franz Wright in passing, whose poetry has had a significant impact on me. A couple of years ago I published an essay (“Absence as a Window: On the Poetry of Franz Wright”) in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin and was always a little disappointed that they never reproduced it…
While E.D. Hirsch can sometimes come across as simply a curmudgeonly defender of a sort of Chicago “Great Books” tradition of cultural literacy, that doesn’t mean he’s not often right. I would commend his recent essay in the New York Review of Books (“How to Save the Schools“) as important reading for educators at any…
I’m still decompressing from the work of organizing the Midwest Regional Conference of the Society of Christian Philosophers here at Calvin College. It was a small, intimate conference that featured a range of scholars, from up-and-coming graduate students to seasoned scholars like William Hasker. With the goal of breaking out of our focus (myopia?) on…
“Out and about” is a Canadianism. Friends in the States inevitably tease us when we say it (“oot and aboot?,” they ask). Yeah, it gets old… Anyway, here are a few of my recent essays, articles, and reviews from around the web that might be of interest: “Practice Overload? A Response to Willimon” at the…