Forming Hearts through Stories: A Review of Tending the Heart of Virtue, by Vigen Guroian
In an earlier essay, I lauded the benefits of teaching catechisms to young children. Although I still stand by that piece, I have become convinced that stories—rather than sheer didactic teaching—are central to the shaping of our inner lives, characters, and understanding of God. I suspect that memorizing a catechism without the benefit of a story-formed heart will most likely produce a meager harvest. By God’s design, stories are at...
Recommended Books (Spring 2023)
Reading allows us to consult the broader wisdom of mankind as it works out ideas and beliefs in specific circumstances and reports back on the results. Authors from vastly different times and places can give us insight into the issues of our day, providing much-needed counsel to help us be wise as serpents. Below, you will find reading suggestions from our group that come from a wide range of disciplines and topics. We think these...
Book Review of F. Leroy Forlines’s “Secularism and the American Republic”
Forlines, F. Leroy. Secularism and the American Republic: Revisiting Thomas Jefferson on Church and State. Edited by Matthew Steven Bracey. Gallatin, TN: Welch College Press, 2022. F. Leroy Forlines remained committed to interdisciplinary study until the end of his life, and that is clear in his latest work, Secularism and the American Republic. This Arminian theologian of the twentieth century sought to provide Christians with a...
Recommended Books (Winter 2023)
Arctic storms, shortened daylight hours, and rainy/snowy weather forces us indoors during the cold winter months. Even as we appreciate and enjoy the austerity of this time of year, it also encourages us to look forward to spring and resurrection. So, as we fill the longer nights with family activities and time indoors, we have great opportunities to reach for new books. Below, you will find reading suggestions from our group that...
Recommended Books (Autumn 2022)
Every generation undoubtedly feels a sense of dislocation, but the world seems to be growing increasingly strange. The old liberal order fashioned in the nineteenth century and bludgeoned horribly during the twentieth appears to be tottering in the early twenty-first—wars in Europe, spasmodic breakdown of social order in major cities in the West and East, COVID-19 and the ensuing social chaos and governmental overreach, and economic...
Review of God in Eternity and Time: A New Case for Human Freedom by Robert E. Picirilli
In this succinct yet erudite work, Robert E. Picirilli brings a fresh perspective to the age-old debate regarding divine sovereignty and human freedom. That debate, as Picirilli views it, is often predicated “on the concept of God as formulated in metaphysical philosophy rather than on God as he reveals himself in the biblical narrative, mutually influencing and being influenced by the race of human beings he made to bear, or be, his...
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