StephenBarkley.com

My sister gave me a copy of Hap Wilson’s The Cabin: A Search for Personal Sanctuary for Christmas this year. I’m thoroughly enjoying it, especially since I paddled past it a couple years ago and can picture all the scenery. This astute quote is the epigram to chapter ten: The major problems in the world [...]

Candide © 1759 Translated by Henry Morley © 1922 Barnes & Noble Classics 146 pages It’s funny how many small coincidences there are in life. I picked up this book about a year ago with good intentions, only to let it sit on a shelf until I stuffed it into a box to move to [...]

While working my way through Wright’s monster-sized volume on the resurrection (The Resurrection of the Son of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God, Vol. 3)), I found this inspiring nugget: Paul will not say that death is a good thing; it is still, for him, the final enemy (1 Corinthians 15.26). But even [...]

Last Sunday at WSPC, we wrapped up our series on “Our Role in God’s Kingdom”. We looked at the Kingdom of God, the role of the local church, and the role that each person contributes to the whole. The core of this series was a detailed look at the seven gifts that Paul listed in [...]

The Cabin: A Search for Personal Sanctuary © 2005 Natural Heritage Books 175 pages I’ve entrusted my life to Hap Wilson in the past: I’ve followed his maps through the backcountry of Temagami, and down the Missinaibi River. I have learned to respect his accurate map making and rapid-sketching skills. When I heard that he [...]

This came from the mind of a elderly man with Parkinson’s disease who was contemplating suicide—all via the mind of Jonathan Franzen in The Corrections. The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but [...]

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman © 1999 Pereus Publishing 270 pages This book was a pleasure to read. The topics ranged from nanotechnology to covert pranks in the Manhattan Project! On every page, Feynman’s sense of humor and love for truth and discovery shine through. It [...]

I found this profound gem in A Faith and Culture Devotional: Beauty can be painful to bear alone.

For anyone who has wrestled with science and Genesis, Walton’s book (The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate) is quite the page-turner. Here’s one of his best lines: Science cannot offer an unbiblical view of material origins, because there is no biblical view of material origins aside from the very [...]

The Corrections: A Novel © 2001 Farrar, Straus and Giroux 568 pages I took a quick look at the Amazon reviews for this book and was quite surprised. I just assumed everyone would love it—I certainly did! The Corrections is an massive work. The plot is simple on the surface: an elderly woman wants to [...]