Recommended Books (Autumn 2023)
Beautiful autumn days beckon us to spend our afternoons and evenings out of doors. Amid all the hustle and bustle of daily life, especially if you have children in school or are in school yourself, it can be difficult to devote time to reading. But good books bring extra light into our lives and open new vistas of understanding about the world around us. So we recommend taking a book out to the porch swing or a favorite clearing in...
Reflections on Pixar: Monsters, Up, and Brave
The animation studio Pixar produced its first movie, Toy Story (1995), when I was a boy. I liked it well enough but did not love it as much as others did. The first Pixar movie to capture my imagination was unquestionably Monsters, Inc. (2001). I found it incredibly creative and infectiously funny. Through the years and decades, Pixar has gained the reputation of producing stories that are qualitatively superior to other animated...
The Family Table
by Emily Vickery The first thing that comes to mind when I think of Corrie is the smell of a home-cooked meal. Corrie was a former youth group member from my parents’ early ministry, and she came back into our lives when I was entering middle school. She is ten years younger than my parents, and I thought she was cool. She taught me how to style my curly hair and how to dress for my 5’1 frame, lessons that seemed vital to my...
I Look to the Stars: Embracing the Joy of General Revelation
Astronomy When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained (Psalm 8:3 KJV). My parents were my teachers. They homeschooled me and my four younger siblings from first grade through high school. When I was nine or ten, my mother began to teach us about astronomy. We learned to identify the constellations of the northern hemisphere from studying books on astronomy and star maps:...
Samuel Richardson’s Use of John Murton and Roger Williams on Religious Liberty
In the past couple of years, a great deal of discussion has occurred regarding Baptist political theology. It has often focused on what Baptists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries taught on religious liberty and how Baptists today should approach religious liberty in post-Christian America. Some self-professed Baptists have even advocated for forms of Magisterial Protestantism, which is at odds with Baptist political theology...
The Church as the Plausibility Structure
“You might be the only Bible that someone ever reads.” This phrase has been repeated in youth group rooms and from pulpits across our country. The sentiment is good. It is a reminder for individual Christians to take seriously a biblical ethic. If believers claim to believe the Bible is true, then they should follow it so that their lives would reflect that truth. Moreover, non-Christians often will not start with the Bible in their...
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