Archive of entries posted by Ray
A Peculiar People
The latest issue of Touchstone Magazine contains my review of David Lyle Jeffrey’s excellent book, We Were a Peculiar People Once: Confessions of an Old-Time Baptist. Part memoir, part prophetic critique, this book is uproariously funny as well as insightful and devastating. You can read the review, and I hope you read the book. In …
Best Reads of 2023
Each year I keep a list of the books I read all the way through, typically with brief notes, as a way of tracking my thoughts and a way to look back on each year and see some of what influenced me. So, in this post I have drawn from that list some of the …
New Book On Union University History
This week a new booked edited by Justin Wainscott and myself and published by Union University Press was released: Lest We Forget: Founders’ Day Addresses from Union University, Bicentennial Edition. I am excited to see this come to fruition. This is now the second published volume of Founders’ Day addresses from Union. The previous book was …
Ready to Die for Souls
Desiring God this week published a brief essay I wrote on the missionary zeal of the Reformers. This is a popular introduction to what I have written on more extensively elsewhere. The misconception that the Reformers had little interest in missions and evangelism lingers despite the evidence, so I hope this little article can be …
“Queer Comments”
This is the title Touchstone Magazine gave to my article in their most recent issue. I was taken aback by Frederick Bruner’s comments on the Romans 1 in relation to homosexuality. I had enjoyed some of Bruner’s prior writing so I was really disappointed to see him cave on homosexuality. You can read more about …
Prayer for Growth, Newton
My poem of the week this week is this powerful hymn from John Newton. I find it deeply challenging and instructive. It is a reminder of God’s good purposes in trials and that the ease which I so much crave is not always the way of life. I asked the Lord that I might growIn …
Left Out!
Looking back over quotes from my reading this past year, I realized I had failed to record three books on my master list which meant they were not included in my year end post. And two of them would have vied for inclusion in my top 10! Since I left them out, I wanted to …
Best Reads of 2022
Each year I keep a list of the books I read all the way through, typically with brief notes, as a way of tracking my thoughts and a way to look back on each year and see some of what influenced me. So, in this post I have drawn from that list some of the …
Spurgeon, To Lead You Must Love
“A man who is to do much with men must love them and feel at home with them. An individual who has no geniality about him had better be an undertaker and bury the dead, for he will never succeed in influencing the living…A man must have a great heart, if he would have a …