Homeward Bound

A few years ago, when I was safely removed from the required reading of school, I started to read. And I started to like it. While I do read some books for fun, I largely try to punch above my mental weight class with my books. I figure if you go often to those great minds and deep thinkers who have so influenced societies, those classic authors who so captured the human experience, those theologians who have so accurately communicated the deep things of God—eventually something will stick. To be sure there is much that does not stick. There are many books I start  each year  with eagerness only to leave unfinished. Still, I have found the searching out and reading of good books to be a habit that I want to develop further each year. I’d like to think it has expanded my mind and I know it has solidified ideas and positions in my head that were formerly rather foggy. Perhaps more foundationally, I have found certain books to have become a part of me. By shaping the way I think a

Sometimes we view Christianity as a mercenary affair. We look at the world and the fun they are having in their lasciviousness--while we perpetually mortify our flesh and self-flagellate--and we think to ourselves: “Soon enough the tables will be reversed. Soon enough we will be the ones who are having fun, and they the suffering.” And we then wrinkle our brows and clench our fists as we await further blows from our earthly prison. This view of the Christian walk as an unhappy life of self-denial is undoubtedly the way the world views religion, but it should not be the way the saint views it. To be sure there is self-denial, suffering, dying to self even; but we are mistaken if we view even these central aspects of our journey as morbid and dreary, devoid of all joyful vitality. Despite what appearances may indicate the reality is the tables are already reversed. The Christian already has access to the infinite source of all heaven’s bounty. It was C. S. Lewis who once said, “He who

Every once and a while I will run across a passage of writing that stops me in my tracks. I decided to share one such passage below from the famed Puritan John Owen writing on the wisdom of God in the mystery of his plan finally revealed in Jesus Christ. Written originally in 1657, you will find the language archaic, but hopefully that will not take away from the glory presented below: “Eph iii. 10, it is called, 'The manifold wisdom of God;' and to discover the depth and riches of this wisdom, he tells us in that verse that it is such, that principalities and powers, that very angels themselves, could not in the least measure get any acquaintance with it, until God, by gathering of a church of sinners, did actually discover it. Hence Peter informs us, that they who are so well acquainted with all the works of God, do yet bow down and desire with earnestness to look into these things (the things of the wisdom of God in the gospel), 1 Pet. i. 12. It asks a man much wisdom

A Joy to Read Lincoln Team of Rivals is a special book. There is no other way to say it. I cannot imagine the hours, the years, the research, the extensive compiling and organization it must have taken Doris Kearns Goodwin to write this masterpiece. Over the last two months I have been plodding through this Pulitzer prize winning book, enjoying every detail, savoring every character—in what has to be one of my favorite periods of American history. Goodwin is a very good writer and because the book is so laden with direct source material, I feel assured that she is giving nothing more than the full flavor of Lincoln and the figures that composed his cabinet. Team of Rivals traces the story of Lincoln (primarily), Bates, Seward, and Chase—all political figures running for the 1860 Republican Presidential nomination. After Lincoln shockingly won the nomination, he assembled these three “rivals” as the primary cogs of his cabinet, key players who would prove indispensable throug