Essential luggage

I might like one of these, if I ever traveled without my own vehicle (we stack our books on the dashboard or in a canvas bag tossed in the back). Playwright Tom Stoppard travels a lot in other people’s vehicles. Full story here.

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Federal employee vs. private employee compensation

The average compensation for federal (civilian) employees in 2000 was 66% more than the compensation for employees of private industry. Nine years later they make twice as much.

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George Orwell’s 1984 reconsidered

I had to make a very long drive last Thursday, and the day before that I was in town, so I stopped by the library to see what recorded books they might have. There was plenty of stuff I had no interest in, but one caught my eye, George Orwell’s 1984. It’s been at least [...]

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A life shaped by market forces

I’ve never understood how we made the leap from Adam Smith’s observation that we can sometimes serve the interests of others by serving our own interests, i.e. do well by doing good, to the idea that enlightened self-interest is sufficient to insure the best possible outcome for all involved, i.e. greed is good. Counterexamples are [...]

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Tradition and Innovation, Part 6

This entire series was inspired by a blog post from Michael Spencer, also known as the Internet Monk. Spencer’s writing intrigues me because he will occasionally offer a bald observation that most other writers on church culture are too guarded to make. This post was a particularly good example, and I will begin by pointing [...]

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My kind of piety

A graphic I can relate to. Original found here.

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Technical note: changes to this weblog

I’ve made a couple of changes to this weblog which should be relatively transparent. First, I moved it from my own server to a free wordpress.com account; however, anyone looking in the old location should be redirected here automatically. Second, I’ve switched the permalink style (the format of the URLs used to point to a [...]

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Why Johnny Can’t Preach, by T. David Gordon

I bought this book on the recommendation of the Midland Agrarian, who knows the writer. The book assumes a traditional definition of what constitutes good preaching, and if you accept that (which I think most people will) then the book does a very good job of making an important point: very few pastors these days [...]

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“… you can't tell what your treatment will cost.”

Another ground-zero health care report from Andrew Sullivan’s blog: I’m a bankruptcy lawyer, so I’m in one of the two groups that will be hurt by real health care reform (insurance companies being the other). About a third of my clients are in bankruptcy due to medical bills (another third have some medical bills, but [...]

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Scripture, unloaded

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. (Inigo Montoya, swordsman) As [the congregation] yelled, ‘Yeah!’, ‘Amen!’ and ‘Awesome!’ I wanted to yell, ‘I don’t get it!’. I love the way religion convinces people by making things deliberately incomprehensible and you feel too shy to say ‘I [...]

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