My family and I recently spent some time at L’Abri in Huemoz, Switzerland.[1] While there, I gave two lectures, arguing that we might mimic the methodology of the Preacher in Ecclesiastes who, instead of speaking from Torah or existing wisdom, created new wisdom…
Call for Papers: Arts and Narrative, September 26-27, 2013 The 7th Verge Conference at the School of the Arts, Media + Culture Trinity Western University Langley, British Columbia, Canada Stories shape us. Personal, religious, national, and global identities are created and mitigated by…
There’s a trend afoot. More and more millennials, among others, are opting to listen to their music the old-fashioned way: on cassettes and on vinyl. While the trend may still be seen as niche, it’s fast-growing and worth watching. However,…
When postmodernity marked the “aestheticization” of reality, the lines between high and low culture collapsed and a sensibility devoted to seeing the world as a theater for aesthetic experience sprang into being. Camp, as inventoried in Susan Sontag’s seminal 1964…
James K.A. Smith, The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic, 2nd ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012, xviii + 229pp., £14.99 paper. In this 2nd edition of his first book, James K.A. Smith, Professor of Philosophy at Calvin…
Many times in conversation, having described the marvelous sophistication of thought that goes into dancing and choreography, if I do not receive a blank stare, I hear something along the lines of, “I have a hard time watching dance because…
Can we add anything to the universe? Can we give anything back to God that he has not already given to us? When we try to answer these questions, we sometimes feel torn between two extremes. On the one hand,…
In a recent article titled How to Discourage Artists in the Church, Philip G. Ryken suggests that ‘[m]any Christian artists live between two strange worlds,’ caught between the oddities of the art world and the church world. Ryken writes about how…
Robert Wuthnow. The God Problem: Expressing Faith and Being Reasonable. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univeristy of California Press, 2012, ix + 332 pp., £24.95 cloth. In this book, Robert Wuthnow, Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, investigates…