Category Archive: Miscellaneous
Neocalvinism
Project Neocalvinisme is a site with a wealth of material by Kuyper, Bavinck, Schilder, and others. Thanks to Gideon Strauss for the link. There’s only one catch. Most of this stuff is in Dutch.
Spurgeon on Smoking
Here is an interesting collection of anecdotes about Charles Spurgeon’s love of a good cigar. It doesn’t include the one that John Piper recounts in an article on the value of reading biographies:
Spurgeon said to a Methodist critic, “If I ever find myself smoking to excess, I promise I shall quit entirely.””What would you call smoking to excess?” the man asked.
“Why, smoking two cigars at the same time!” was the answer.
Tuttle on Wright
This looks interesting: Mark Horne has started a new discussion/blog called Tuttle on Wright. “What is it?” you ask. It’s a discussion of N. T. Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God which Mark is conducting with several young men from the town of Tuttle.
Social Climbing
I was glancing through the entries in Arts and Letters Daily and came across an article by P. J. O’Rourke. The article is a review of several new books on etiquette, none of which are as good as Emily Post’s (at least, before other people started editing Post’s books). One, The Fabulous Girl’s Guide to Decorum, is particularly abysmal, it seems, marred by a pretty complete lack of manners or morals. The authors encourage bragging, lying on resumes, affairs with your boss, and (if you want to be traditional) waiting at least two dates before sleeping with a guy. O’Rourke’s analysis is great:
”The Fabulous Girl’s Guide” is to social climbing what Dante’s ”Inferno” would be to salvation if Dante had chosen Petronius instead of Virgil as his docent in Hades: ”The eighth circle is tough to get into. We’re talking hypocrites and evil counselors and I mean major players, not run-of-the-mill Sunday talk-show pundits. Fortunately, I got our names on the list.”
Which reminds me that I need to read Dante sometime….
Tolle, Blogge
Another new blog to check out: Tolle, Blogge. It belongs to Russ Reeves, who’s Associate Professor of History at Trinity Christian College. He quotes a great passage from Herman Bavinck’s In the Beginning, in which Bavinck speaks about God’s grace before the Fall and denies that it was possible for Adam to merit anything from God. One of these days, I’m gonna have to read Bavinck myself!
Perceptive
In Woody Allen’s movie The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, there’s a scene in which Allen, accused of a series of burglaries, faces his boss. He’s protesting his innocence, sure that someone must be out to frame him.
BOSS: “Do you know what they call people who think that everybody’s out to get them?”
ALLEN: “Yeah: perceptive.”
I thought about that quotation as I surfed a blog or two recently….
Poise
Here’s a quotation from P. G. Wodehouse’s Uneasy Money:
At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies.
Never Caught Up
Has this ever happened to you? I’m about sixty pages into Doug Wilson’s Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning. Yesterday, I received a copy of New St. Andrews College‘s newsletter, Scriptorium, and what should I read in the Faculty Updates? “Douglas Wilson, Senior Fellow, is completing a revised and expanded edition of his ground-breaking Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning.” Augh! Now I don’t know whether to finish reading the copy I’ve got or not!
Bill’s Blog
Well, Bill DeJong‘s blog is back after a short delay, but he has a new address now. He says that Blogger let him log in, but didn’t give him access to his blog, for some reason. So he transferred all the old stuff to his new blog. The big, annoying question? Why, even after borrowing my template, does he have the dates of his archives nicely located under his “Archives” heading and I can’t seem to get them to show up there?
AAPC
Well, I’m back from the Pastors Conference in Monroe, Louisiana. I had a wonderful time, though I regret that I wasn’t there for the first night of the conference and had to miss Steve Schlissel’s and Doug Wilson’s first speeches.
Rick picked me up at the airport on Monday night and introduced me to Steve Wilkins. I had supper at the Wilkins’ place and then went to the hotel … and discovered, to my horror, that I’d brought only the first few pages of my lecture outlines! I immediately started sweating, because I figured that would help. I tried to scribble down some of the stuff on the missing pages. And then the Lord calmed me down enough to call one of my elders, Duane Konynenbelt, who went to my house, e-mailed the outlines to Steve Wilkins, and printed them out and faxed them to the hotel. Whew! I owe Duane bigtime now!
I spoke three times on Tuesday, and the talks were very well received. It was great to visit some old friends, to see some people I’ve known only through e-mail (e.g., Rick Capezza, Mark Horne, Jeff Steel), and to meet a lot of new friends. I stayed up till 3:00 AM on Wednesday night (um, actually, Thursday morning) talking and laughing with Rick. Thanks for the Guinness and the talk, Rick!
For more reviews of the conference, you can see Rick‘s, John Butler‘s, and Mark‘s comments. You can get tapes of the conference ($60.00 US) from Auburn Avenue Presbyterian Church.
I see the speaker for their Spring Conference (March 22-24) is Dr. Nelson Kloosterman, professor of NT and Ethics at my alma mater, Mid-America Reformed Seminary, and father-in-law of Bill DeJong.
On another note, my father, whose name is the same as mine, has started a blog of his own. Welcome to the world of blogging, Dad!
Palindrome
Have the official (officious?) people who make it their job to declare years “The Year of” any fool thing that comes to mind done the right thing yet? Have they declared 2002 “The Year of the Palindrome”? I’ve been thinking about palindromes ever since I heard an announcer on CKUA radio talking about them. A palindrome is a word or sentence which reads the same whether you’re reading from right to left or from left to right. “Race car,” for instance, is a palindrome, as is “A Toyota.” Here are some classic palindromes:
“No, sir! Away! A papaya war is on!”Â
“Doc, note: I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod.”
“A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!”
“Go hang a salami; I’m a lasagna hog!”
You are, of course, welcome to post your favourite palindromes in the comments. And till next time, all I can say is, “So, Ida. Adios!”
Heading to Monroe
For the last few days, I’ve been preparing lectures for the Auburn Avenue Presbyterian Church Pastors Conference. This year’s conference is on the covenant, and I’ve been invited to speak, along with Steve Schlissel and Doug Wilson. I’m replacing Norman Shepherd, who had to back out in November because his wife was battling terminal cancer. It’s an honour to take his place. Norman is a friend of mine, and he was secretary of the board at Mid-America Reformed Seminary when I was there.
My three lectures are entitled “Covenant and History,” “Covenant and Election,” and “Covenant and Evangelism.” The one on covenant and election allowed me to think through some of things in my article on baptism and election again. Why do so many (most?) books on election skim over the Old Testament? Why do so few even mention Deuteronomy 7, let alone deal with it in any detail? Joel Garver’s essays on apostasy were helpful, as was his “Brief Catechesis on Covenant and Baptism”.
Now if I can only shake this cold which I seem to have caught….