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I’m speaking on the Good Samaritan in a few weeks, so I started reading Snodgrass’s highly recommended Stories With Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus. Here’s a little something to ponder from the first chapter:
Stories are not inherently Christian and do not automatically convey truth. They can be used to communicate any [...]

While preparing a 1 John post, I came across a beautiful line by Bengel, translated from the Latin by Bultmann for his commentary:
Ubi non est amor, odium est: cor non est vacuum.
Where there is no love, there is hate; the heart is not empty.

Sometimes we need to be reminded of the basics. I’ll let Calvin speak for himself (from the Institutes):
God works in his elect in two ways: within, through his Spirit; without, through his word. By his Spirit, illuminating their minds and forming their hearts to the love and cultivation of righteousness, he makes them a new [...]

In The Devil and Miss Prym: A Novel of Temptation, characters are pictured with angels and devils beside them, each trying to gain influence. I don’t agree with that understanding of anthropology for a couple reasons:

It implies that we have the freedom to choose between good or evil, independent of God.
It smacks of a good/evil [...]

In Rob Bell’s video, Everything Is Spiritual, he uses a great analogy: is a marker a circle or a rectangle? It depends how you look at it. It’s both.
I was faithfully reading Volume 3 of my Harvard Classics when I came across the same idea in Francis Bacon’s Essay, “Of Unity in Religion” (you can [...]

I’m a sucker for complete editions of any author I enjoy. I found my treasured hardback copy of The Complete Father Brown Stories in a second hand bookstore in Stouffville, Ontario.
Chesterton’s Father Brown stories are brilliant in many ways. Aside from the clever mysteries he invents, the perspective of the protagonist—a Catholic priest—gives Chesterton many [...]

This post might be better titled, “Out of Context”. I was reading Richard Feynman’s collection of short works, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, last night. In it was a paragraph that, while aimed as a critique of blind religion, oddly bolstered my own faith:
You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and [...]

Here’s a couple lines from John Keats that struck me as important, from my slim volume of 100 Best-Loved Poems:
Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
from Ode on a Grecian Urn

I found a great Christian Bookstore in Louisville during my summer holidays called Christian Book Nook. (Incidentally, it’s right beside a great local bakery that sells tasty Honey Buns.) Since I’m blogging through the Epistles of John, a used copy of Bultmann’s contribution to Hermeneia caught my attention.
In discussing 1 John 1:4 on joy becoming [...]

I came across some wisdom in a surprising place. At the end of the second volume of the Harvard Classics, George Long wrote an essay on the life of M. Aurelius Antoninus. After considering whether or not Antoninus took part in the pagan religious ceremonies of his day, he offers this:
A prudent governor will not [...]