I read recently of a researcher who wanted to study the effects of pornography on young adult males. He carefully built the structure for the study, determining how he would compare young men who had experienced pornography with a control group comprised of those who had never come into contact it. Tragically this researcher had…
Early in George Orwell’s iconic 1984 is a particularly haunting scene. Winston, the hero of the story, is confessing to his diary a sexual encounter with a prostitute. Though Big Brother rigidly controls even sexual union and though sex is viewed as “a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema,” still Big Brother cannot…
Can you believe it’s been five years since we last saw a new book from Josh Harris (assuming we don’t count the re-titling and re-release of Not Even a Hint / Sex Is Not the Problem, Lust Is)? His last book was Stop Dating the Church which released all the way back near the end…
I kind of wish I had read The Trellis and the Vine in 2009 instead of reading it on January 1, 2010. That way I could have put it in its rightful place on my list of the best books published that year. As it stands, though, the most I can say now is that…
I kind of like Sarah Palin. I did, really, from the moment she burst onto the international scene as John McCain’s running mate. Of course I live in Canada so she would never have been my Vice President but still, I found in her qualities that I admired. Mostly I appreciated her common sense approach…
It has been a couple of years since Richard Dawkins’ last major work, The God Delusion (my review). That book was a long-time fixture on the bestseller lists and served to establish Dawkins as the foremost spokesman for the New Atheists. Dawkins has long had two related emphases in his writing and speaking: the non-existence…
The Ten Commandments was among the first lengthy passages of Scripture I ever committed to memory. Like most children, I was told to memorize the commandments and did so. Every week they were read in church, ensuring that they remained fresh in my mind. And yet, as I’ve grown older, I’ve realized that I think…
Calling the Holy Spirit “Forgotten God” may be a bit of an overstatement. Or perhaps it is an understatement. Some Christians seem to show little evidence that they have any theology of the Spirit while others seem to emphasize the Spirit at the expense of other biblical doctrine. What seems clear is that few Christians…
At the very heart of the gospel, at the very heart of the Christian faith, are two great miracles, two inseparable miracles, through which a dead man is brought to life. The first miracle is justification; here a condemned sinner is made right in the eyes of a perfect judge. The second miracle is regeneration;…
Any time I write a review of a book dealing with prayer I feel the need to point out that bookstore shelves are already groaning under the weight of such books. There are hundreds, thousands probably, of books on prayer. A new one is going to need to be good–very good–to supplant the excellent resources…
Martin Luther got it right when he said, “No theology is genuinely Christian which does not arise from and focus on the cross.” The cross of Christ is the very center point of the Christian faith; indeed, it is the very focal point of all of history. No event will or can be more significant…
John Piper waited forty years to write a book on marriage. It is only after forty years of marriage that he felt like he would have something valuable to say (or something valuable to add to a very crowded genre of book). “Romance, sex, and childbearing are temporary gifts of God. They are not part…
Until I read this book I would not have considered God’s love as a particularly difficult doctrine. The Trinity is a difficult doctrine to understand, impossible even. The eternal nature of God–that is another difficult or impossible one. But the love of God? I wouldn’t have thought of it as such. But this book convinced…
Every now and again I pick up a book that I feel I should really enjoy. And yet, for one reason or another, it simply does not “click.” Unfashionable by Tullian Tchividjian is just such a book. It has been widely praised by Christians I respect and its six (!) pages of endorsements contain a…
Cornelius Venema’s The Promise of the Future, published in 2000 by Banner of Truth, has been hailed as the most important major Reformed study in biblical eschatology since Anthony Hoekema’s The Bible and the Future (published in 1972). It is not coincidental, I am sure, that Venema is a former student of Hoekema. The Promise…
This review is a few weeks overdue. It was almost a month ago that I reviewed Roger Olson’s Finding God in The Shack and at that time I had hoped to review Randal Rauser’s book of the same title within a week. Life being what it is and how it is, the deadline slipped. Today…
It is a question I am asked a lot: what Bible study curriculum do you recommend? I rarely know what to say. There are so many of them available; time would fail me to collect, examine and review them all. I was interested, then, to see that Paul Washer is releasing a new edition of…
I mark this review as Finding God in The Shack I because this month will see the release of two books by two authors but with only one title between them. Both books look to the overwhelming success of William Young’s The Shack, evaluate it, and seek to answer its critics. As one of those…
There may be some who will get no further than the cover or even the title of Take Charge of Your Life. There on the cover is the smiling face of the author, rather a rarity for a book that is actually worth reading. And that title sounds like it may just be the title…
Michael Wittmer feels trapped in the middle. To one side are conservative Christians demanding lockstep allegiance to narrow doctrinal statements–statements so detailed that they insist on specific theories of the end times or specific understandings of the spiritual gifts. Such people interpret doubts, questions, or appreciation for other viewpoints to be the first signs of…