Musings

What makes a book good? I read a decent number of books per year, and I am always quite hesitant to rate a book higher than 4 stars, mostly because I want 5 stars to mean something beyond "I enjoyed this book." To that end, my top books of the year…

I have a love-hate relationship with study Bibles. On the one hand, the Bible is thousands of years old, and you'd be a fool to solely rely upon your own intuition about what it all means. That's not to say there's some mystical secret da Vinci code…

A fun adventure, but depressing in its view of the world.

Last February my company sent me to the Colorado School of Mines, my alma mater, to recruit computer science grads. Many of my former classmates were there as well, and I started chatting with a guy who was telling me about his job where he wrote…

"Was the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith alone an invention or a recovery?" Though Protestants might easily dismiss that question, it would be foolish to do so. The Roman Church asserts that this doctrine that is so central to…

There have been (at least) two trends in my life over the past few years: first, I have grown rather weary of the endless parade of devotional books marching forth from evangelical printing presses, and second I have felt more and more of a desire to…

Why do greater certainty and more control only heighten our fear for what remains outside our control-especially if the possibilities are so improbable? -Bob Cutillo, MD It is a curious thing that health care, whose very existence was once solely…

I consider myself something of a connoisseur of puns. A pundit, you might say. A pun at its essence is simply a play on words, but a good pun exhibits draws an intersection between two otherwise unrelated conceptual fields in one word or phrase. A…

Cooking good food is one of those things we just do not seem to have time for these days. Most folks subsist on a combination of microwaved dinners, takeout, or dine-in. When we do cook, it's usually a matter of popping open boxes from the pantry or…

When my wife and I got married, we thought we'd try our hand at gardening-the fruits of our labor that summer were pitiful, but the joy of growing our own food carried us on. It's a wonderful feeling to grow so much food for free, but the thing is…