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Atwood’s book on Debt (Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth) is brilliant. Although she infuriates me at times with her glib comments on Christian religion, most of her observations are right-on-the-mark. Here’s one of many: The recent fundamentalist Christian Church—especially in the American South—has identified sinning largely with sins of the flesh—especially sexual [...]

This chapter looks at all of Paul’s allusions to the Adam and Eve narrative from Genesis 1-3. If Christ is the second Adam, we had better understand the first one. . . .

Sand County Almanac (Outdoor Essays & Reflections) ©1949, 1953 Ballantine/Random House 295 pages A storm blew up out of nowhere this spring while I was solo paddling the South Branch of the Muskoka river, just outside of Bracebridge. I pushed my canoe into the brush at the end of a secluded bay, and watched the [...]

What do you think? Could art be the substance of the imago dei? One important thing that makes us human, one thing we have that separates us from all other species on our planet, has been noted by psychologists and biologists. It’s not the fact that we have a language to communicate with—other animals, such [...]

A friend recently asked me a simple question: Can we can “touch the heart of God”? The expression is almost too much of a cliché to be meaningful today. (There was an entire series of worship CDs created in the 1990s called, “Touching the Father’s Heart”.) However, since I just reviewed what Paul meant by [...]

The Talisman © 1984 Viking/Penguin 646 pages I took a break from Stephen King for a while after finishing his brilliant Dark Tower heptalogy (yes, I had to look that word up). Having heard that The Talisman dealt with similar themes, I decided to give this King/Straub work a chance. It was quite interesting. If [...]

While preparing a short devotional for a prayer meeting, I revisited C. S. Lewis’ words on adoring God from Prayer: Letters to Malcolm: A third obstacle [to the adoration of God] is greed. Instead of saying: ‘This also is Thou’, one may say the fatal word Encore. Are we satisfied with what God offers us, [...]

Now that we’ve looked at what Paul thinks about God, we’ll see what he thinks about the rest of us. Having been indoctrinated since Bible College in the old trichotomist/dichotomist debates, I’m looking forward to moving beyond. With section headings like sōma, sarx, nous, kardia, psychē, and pneuma, Dunn promises to get right down to [...]

Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (CBC Massey Lectures) © 2008 House of Anansi Press 230 pages This is a fascinating book for a number of reasons: Atwood is a gifted fiction writer and poet who brings her writing skill to bear on this non-fiction topic. The topic itself is quite apropos in [...]

Here’s a wonderfully terse statement of the Qohelet’s understanding of the role of pleasure from A Time to Tear Down and a Time to Build Up: A Rereading of Ecclesiastes: Pleasure anesthetizes the pain of consciousness.