This week Alastair, Matt, and I consider the first of ‘the four loves’ that C.S. Lewis discusses, affection. I think it was a smashing discussion, but that may just be me.
If you do too, though, feel free to share this around, or leave us a review at iTunes. If you’re interested in supporting the show (with money, that is), you can check out our Patreon here. We don’t make any money, but it would be nice if Matt didn’t have to keep losing it.
C.S. Lewis’s work The Four Loves is a classic bit of moral theology and psychological observation, so Matt, Alastair, and I decided to discuss it. Our conversation today focuses on the first two chapters. In two weeks time, we will consider chapter three. So feel free to pick up a copy of your own and join in if you’d like. There’s still the majority of the book to go through with us.
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If you’re interested in supporting the show (you know, with money), you can check out our Patreon here.
Soli Deo Gloria
This week we decided to talk about the Bible. More specifically, we took up the subject of 1 (& 2) Kings and the various themes involved like political theology, God’s fidelity, typology, and a whole mess of other subjects. We had special reference to Peter Leithart’s commentary on the subject. It was a fun chat. We’ll see, we may or may not be visiting the book of 2 Kings in a week or so.
Also, heads-up, we’ll be having a couple of discussions through C.S. Lewis’ The Four Loves. If you’d like to read along, it’ll be up in the next couple of weeks.
A couple of weeks ago, Alan Jacobs wrote a widely-discussed piece on the disappearance of the “Christian Intellectual” from the public scene. We thought it was a great piece, but we wanted to take a deeper stab at the issue. So here are Matt, Andrew, Alastair, and I analyzing and arguing with Jacobs, each other, and possibly persons unknown.
We hope you enjoy it as much as we did. What’s more, we hope our small conversation contributes in some small way to the very important one Dr. Jacobs has begun.
Soli Deo Gloria
This last couple of weeks (and even years) has seen a number of high-profile instances of plagiarism at both academic and popular levels among Evangelical writers and theologians. We thought it would be a good idea to have someone who knows the publishing industry both as a writer as well as a publisher, so we invited Justin Taylor, VP at Crossway books. So we had him on to chat about plagiarism, not only in publishing, but also in preaching too. Also, Matt gets into a fight with the rest of us about the issue of self-plagiarism. So that was fun.
We hope you enjoy the discussion, since we had a lot of fun in it.
Soli Deo Gloria
On this episode of Mere Fidelity, Philosopher Michael Austin joins us to discuss the Olympics, sport, and whether we should watch any of it anyway. Austin is the editor of a variety of volumes on philosophy and sport, is a frequent writer at Psychology Today, and is a professor at Eastern Kentucky University.
The excerpt Alastair read is below, and is taken from this article:
In their beliefs, Coubertin and his followers were liberals in the spirit of Thomas Jefferson and John Stuart Mill. Deeply suspicious of conventional theistic religions, they promoted Olympism as a substitute for traditional faith. “For me,” Coubertin wrote in his Mémoires Olympiques, “sport is a religion with church, dogma, ritual.” In a radio address delivered in Berlin on August 4, 1935, he repeated his frequently expressed desire that the games be inspired by “religious sentiment transformed and enlarged by the internationalism and democracy that distinguish the modern age.” Nearly thirty years later, Coubertin’s most dedicated disciple, Avery Brundage, proclaimed to his colleagues on the International Olympic Committee that Olympism is a twentieth-century religion, “a religion with universal appeal which incorporates all the basic values of other religions, a modern, exciting, virile, dynamic religion” (pp. 2-3).
Here’s the show. We hope you enjoy:
Soli Deo Gloria
Satire has been around for a while. It’s taken a new life, especially, through the rise of sites like The Onion. But it has been something of a hot topic lately for Evangelicals with the rise of the new site, The Babylon Bee. So we decided to have a little chat about it with our friend and literary expert, Karen Swallow Prior. This was a very fun show and I think you’ll enjoy it.
We mention Jonathan Swift’s famous essay “A Modest Proposal” on this show, as well as this analysis of ‘punching up’ in American comedy.
If you enjoy this, please feel free to tweet, share, etc.
Soli Deo Gloria
On this week’s episode of Mere Fidelity, Alastair, Andrew, and I discuss a recent article by Helen Andrews on the subject of meritocracy and the way it has replaced (and in some ways replicated) the older Aristocratic order. You should take the time to read it. It’s a fascinating piece. In any case, we take it up and discuss it more broadly and then in relation to the church. Because that’s what we do.
Hope you enjoy.
Soli Deo Gloria
Joshua Ryan Butler is a friend and one of my favorite newer authors. I got to know him after I reviewed his last book The Skeletons in God’s Closet for the Gospel Coalition and ended up loving it.
Well, now he’s back with a follow-up book The Pursuing God: A Reckless, Irrational, Obsessed Love That’s Dying to Bring Us Home. In this book, he tackles the difficult issues like incarnation, atonement, wrath, and the Trinity in order to show that the God of the Gospel really is good, and the gospel really is good news.
Now, I’d typically give you a full review, but I sort of already blurbed it, so I’m just going to share my endorsement and urge you to pick the thing up:
Joshua Ryan Butler is enthralled by the vision of a beautiful God whose goodness goes down deep into his bones and he wants us to share it. Unlike so many today, though, his way of inviting us into that vision is not to paper over the dark stains that mar our popular pictures of God, but to face them head-on. In The Pursuing God, Butler sets out to restore a portrait of the biblical gospel of God’s incarnate, crucified, and risen Son, correcting our worst caricatures of sacrifice and atonement, and revealing the glory of the triune God who has been relentlessly seeking to restore us to himself.
Honestly, this is one of those books I’m sort of bummed I didn’t get to write myself. That said, I’m also glad Josh did. He’s got a way with images and metaphors that flip things on their head and show you that all the stuff in Christianity that we’re tempted to do away with are actually what we need most.
Also, I have to say, I was extremely impressed with the way he was able to take some of the best, recent scholarship on the issue of wrath, judgement, and penal substitution, and present it in a non-academic, life-giving way, without selling you short theologically. This is probably now my favorite, popular-level book on the subject to date, and I think it’s the place to start if you’re either having trouble with these issues, or are looking to preach to those who do.
Buy it. Read it. Get copies for your friends and family and you’ll have birthdays and Christmas covered for the next 6 months.
But in case none of this has sold you, yet, Alastair and I had Josh on the podcast to chat about the book. I hope this whets your appetite to pick it up.
Soli Deo Gloria
Alright, so I’ve missed posting a few of the recent episodes of Mere Fidelity. I’ve been writing papers and the like for class. All the same, here is the latest episode in which Alastair and I discuss Pentecost, the gift of the Spirit, and our theology of the church, especially from the text of Acts 2. As you might imagine, there’s a lot of discussion of the various connections between Acts and the whole of Scripture as well as some of the theological implications we can derive for today.
As always, if you find any of this helpful, please do share. You can also follow the podcast on iTunes, or using this RSS feed. Listen to past episodes on Soundcloud and on this page on Alastair’s blog.
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incompletely reformed thoughts on God, ministry, and life
incompletely reformed thoughts on God, ministry, and life
incompletely reformed thoughts on God, ministry, and life
incompletely reformed thoughts on God, ministry, and life
incompletely reformed thoughts on God, ministry, and life
incompletely reformed thoughts on God, ministry, and life
incompletely reformed thoughts on God, ministry, and life
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