Tried With Fire

It's been a while since I've gotten back to blogging regularly. Part of it is I'm still in mourning for my dad. I think grief is going to be a steady stream that flows below the surface. It may rise or ebb, but it's always there. Another part is having too many thoughts in my head to organize in a coherent manner and reading too many books simultaneously. So in lieu of a pensieve, this post will be the repository for the random thoughts that have been swirling in my brain based on my recent reading. I wonder if my lack of concentration is due to my use of social media. I'm halfway through Reader, Come Home by Maryanne Wolf. (Ironically I learned of the book via @scifri on Twitter.) Wolf is a neuroscientist and reading specialist. She is concerned that too much screen reading is impairing our ability to read deeply which impairs our ability to think and feel deeply. She is coming from an evolutionary perspective, so she believes that our reading brains evolved o...

What everybody believes is not always what's actually true. Commonly held opinions are frequently just plain false. Often we are persuaded by authority and repetition rather than by evidence and reality. This tendency to accept what surrounds us makes it difficult to separate what we really know from what we just believe we know... How can people, for thousands of years, believe false assertions that are easily disproved? Answer: Individuals tend to accept ideas if people they know and respect state or believe those ideas. You need to be very clear about the foundations of your opinions. If you believe something only because another person - even a professor - told you it was so, then you should not view your understanding as rock solid... Search for evidence and don't be satisfied until you know the why. The authors of the above quote use Galileo as an example. For nearly 2000 years, everyone believed Aristotle's idea that objects fall at a rate proportional to their ...

I've been reading Aimee Byrd's new book,  No Little Women. So far, so good, and a review will be forthcoming, Lord willing. I did skip ahead, though, to the 9th chapter "Honing and Testing Our Discernment Skills." 1 Aimee shares four essential questions to ask about what we read, and then lets the reader put it into practice on excerpts from popular women's books. I'm posting more on these questions at Out of the Ordinary  tomorrow, so stay tuned. As I was considering Aimee's call for discernment, my gut feeling is that women are at a disadvantage in pursuing a life of the mind  because of past cultural norms. Therefore, we may be more inclined to accept rather than critique. But does evangelicalism even encourage this type of critical thinking in the first place? I may be wrong, but I believe it promotes the very opposite. If you read authors like Nancy Pearcey, Mark Noll, David Wells, and Nathan Hatch, to name a few, history has shown that Americ...

Philosophy for Christians? You bet! I'm sharing a few mini-reviews at Out of the Ordinary of books/resources that can help Christians think and convey ideas more clearly. Read the post here .

Over the years, we've studied some very interesting topics in Sunday school. We learned about eschatology, the law's relationship to the believer, the Protestant versus Roman Catholic view of justification, and creation, to name a few. These subjects also had something in common - differing biblical interpretation which resulted in disagreement among Christians. Given the opposing viewpoints, the teacher was very careful to use primary sources. This would prevent any misrepresentation and allow each camp to speak for itself. Although he probably needed to read material with which he disagreed, this demonstrated his intellectual integrity and the desire to provide accurate information to the class. For example, I had heard from someone somewhere in the past that the Roman Catholic view of justification is "justification by works." Our teacher pointed out that this statement is incorrect. Rome would agree with justification by faith and the need for meritorious work...