Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Descartes Missing Doubts
If you’ve studied philosophy at any point (pop culture even counts on this one) then you are most likely familiar with Rene Descartes and his famous saying “I think, therefore I am.” You may even know the Latin, cogito ergo sum. Bonus points for you, even more so if you know that Descartes’ modus operandi was…
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Jesus, Paul and the People of God
Overview This book is edited by Nicholas Perrin and Richard Hays and has essays authored by: Jeremy Begbie Markus Bockmuehl Richard B. Hays Edith M. Humphrey Sylvia Keesmaat and Brian Walsh Nicholas Perrin Marianne Meye Thompson Kevin J. Vanhoozer Now, originally these were all lectures delivered at Wheaton’s 2010 Theology Conference, which was, as one…
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Adventures in Architecture
My life can basically be broken into three phases, which helpfully, correspond to the close to three decades I’ve lived. Phase One Roughly 20 years ago, when I was 7, pretty much all I did was play with Legos. On the one hand, I pretty much always built what was on the box top. On…
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Metaphorically Thinking: Conduits
In the 3rd chapter of Metaphors We Live By, we learn that while metaphors can illuminate our understanding of things, they can also obscure it as well. To illustrate, Lakoff and Johnson present the conduit metaphor: Ideas (or meanings) are objects Linguistic expressions are containers Communication is sending This is certainly a helpful metaphor, and…
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Justification and Adoption
[This post is part of The Christian Faith series] On the one hand, this section (and the next) of Michael Horton’s The Christian Faith presents some of the strongest parts of the book. Most likely this is because there is the most overlap here with his previously published dogmatics, but also because this seems to finally be…
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Note to Self: The Discipline of Preaching To Yourself
Note to Self is a deceptively simple book. The first 10 pages explain the subtitle (why we need the discipline of preaching to ourselves), but then the rest of the book is actual “notes” to help you start regularly preaching to yourself. This is nothing short of genius. While a slim book (it shouldn’t take…
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Rain Men in the Church
Everybody has seen Rain Man. Actually that’s not true. I’ve never seen it completely. I’ve seen enough to get the gist of it, though the only scene I can visibly recall is the one where Tom Cruise uses Dustin Hoffman’s supreme ability to remember and recall in order to make bank at blackjack. Hoffman’s character,…
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Recovering and Discovering
Well, graduation weekend is officially over. My parents are somewhere in the airspace between here and Memphis, and I’m on break from teaching lessons. It was a great weekend, I’m glad they could come in (and my wife’s Aunt Dorian as well) and we got to spend time together as I moved past this milestone…
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Already/Not Yet Graduate
One day, I will have a semi-normal graduation experience. But not today. After busting it for 4 years, I am participating the commencement exercises at what my map app calls “The Baptodome.” Yes, in a technical sense I graduate today from Dallas Theological Seminary. In a non-technical sense, I will graduate August 5th. It has…
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Union With Christ
[This post is part of The Christian Faith series] Now that the semester has come to an end, it’s time to resume working through Horton’s The Christian Faith. First off, I think Horton does well to cover union with Christ first, and then turn to justification. Calvin would be proud, as would interestingly, N. T. Wright. But…
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