Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Understanding A Car Crash
Let’s start with a question: Should we start a parent murdering ministry? This may seem like an extremely odd, severely misguided question. So, let’s fill it out with some context… It comes from a point in yesterday’s sermon at The Village Church that Matt Chandler was illustrating. The point being that arguing from pure pragmatics is…
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Need to Read 10.15.10
An interesting answer to the question: What does Lady Gaga mean? Very little, argues Camille Paglia. But that’s precisely the sort of cultural icon this generation relates to. Gaga=flashy lights, bright colors, pleasing sounds, funky beats, shocking vaudeville clips, “what is she wearing?” hyperlink viral fodder, and bits and pieces of politics thrown in for…
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Some Pre-November Reading
Over the weekend I read Carl Trueman’s new book Republocrat: Confessions of a Liberal Conservative. Basically, to give you an idea who this book is mainly for, it breaks out into two groups of people: Those who love Glenn Beck Those who hate Glenn Beck I could I suppose add a third category for those…
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Hipster Christianity
While I sat in a Starbucks in Orlando reading this book back in early August, I had not idea how much attention it would later get. I should have realized though that a book titled Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Collide would definitely generate a buzz. Here a just a few reviews and interactions floating…
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Can Music Be Christian?
[This post is part of the Revamping Christian Worship series] Technically… No, only people are capable of being Christians. But in another sense, what is sacred music if not self-consciously Christian? I think the issue might be one of semantics. When we talk about “Christian music” we are generally talking about music that has lyrics that are…
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A Theological Mad Lib (sort of)
I’ll post some more thoughts on this book in the coming days, but as I was finishing John Frame’s Doctrine of the Knowledge of God today, he offered a schema for an inappropriate defense of Christian doctrine. It’s in the section covering logic as a tool of theology and is dealing with the informal fallacies…
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Need to Read 10.01.10
While most churches may still do altar calls, the Village Church, where I attend, does not. Geoff Ashley explains why. Tim Challies has a helpful review of Stephen Hawking’s The Grand Design. Learn about how the fallacy of the beard relates to Glenn Beck, and more importantly, what bearing it has on the current discussions about…
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Like Dancing About Architecture
[This post is part of the Revamping Christian Worship series] I’ve heard the quote attributed to both Thelonius Monk, and Elvis Costello, and it is possible they have both said it, but certainly in a way, talking about music is like dancing about architecture. As a musician, I can completely understand this, but at the…
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Dominion and Dynasty
I am a big fan of the New Studies in Biblical Theology series, and this title is no exception. In Dominion and Dynasty, Stephen Dempster walks you through a theology of the Old Testament, but in an easily accessible way, focusing on the literary character of the Old Testament as a Text (capitalized to help you think…
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Need to Read 9.24.10
Matt Perman over at What’s Best Next has a helpful summary of the core of Daniel Pink’s Drive, highlighting th e3 components of motivation: Autonomy Mastery Purpose Click through if you’re interested in motivation, or as the title suggests, if you want to find out why you might not like your job. Some other posts you…
Got any book recommendations?