My colleague, Jim Patterson, recently passed on to me an excerpt from Bonhoeffer’s Life Together where he discusses praying the Psalms. It is a good piece on how and why we can pray the Psalms, including the imprecatory psalms and the ones that claim innocence. His basic argument is that the Psalms are the prayers …
“I believe I am not mistaken in saying that Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether.” – Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, as cited in White & Yeats, Franchising McChurch: Feeding Our Obsession with Easy Christianity, 139.
As part of the ongoing Psalms Project here at Union Don Whitney will be with us Thursday April 23 for a seminar titled, “Turning the Words of Scripture into the Wings of Your Prayers: The Simple, Permanent Cure to Boring Repetition in Prayer.” He will focus on praying the Psalms. Here is the schedule for …
Guns of the Lion, Douglas Bond Faith & Freedom Trilogy (P&R, 2008), pb., 260 pp. Ages 6+ Readers of this blog will know that the Van Nestes are big fans of Doug Bond. When he visited last month than and began reading to us this latest book on the M’Kethe family, it was a treat. …
Bond. Doug Bond– far more beneficial than the sometimes known British cousin James. Douglas Bond has started a blog where you can see updates on speaking events, forthcoming books and other material from him. You can also find there J. C. Ryle’s Thoughts for Young Men (entire book) read by Bond. This is an exciting …
Check out Ray Ortlund’s post, “I Remember When.” It is not simple nostalgia but a warning about “chronological snobbery” (to use C S Lewis’s term). There is much to contemplate in the post. Here is just one excerpt: I remember when churches were not commodities but communities. I grew up in a spiritual neighborhood, where …
The last two weeks in Sunday School at our church I have taught on the Fall and the resulting spread of sin. It is always good and challenging for me to study these texts again. The audio of the lessons are online (recorded last semester). In the first session I aim to walk through Genesis …
I mentioned previously that my family has begun to sing Psalm 128 at our dinner table. It has been very enjoyable and a great blessing in various ways. We have begun including other psalms. Recently, we ate dinner at a fast food restaurant in order to go on to a store for some errands. I …
I have recently read Julia Duin’s Quitting Church: Why the Faithful are Fleeing and What to Do about It and I hope to post some thoughts from it. For now, I wanted to post this quote from Eugene Peterson. As usual, when talking about pastoral ministry, he is so good! In a day when hard-edged …
Dr. Ryken’s address this morning, “The Psalms as Lyric Poems for Private Worship,” was wonderful. He essentially argued that to appreciate and benefit from the Psalms we need to appreciate them as poetry (appropriate for National Poetry Month!). He accurately noted how our approach today is so often to try to flatten out the imagery …