Kindle Deal: You Can Change: God’s Transforming Power for Our Sinful Behavior and Negative Emotions by Tim Chester. $3.99.
Podcast of the Week: So, What’s an Evangelical? Good conversation here on Quick to Listen with Thomas Kidd on evangelical history and occasional crises.
Seven of the best articles I came across this week:
1. Jared Wilson – “Yesterday” and the Forgotten Gospel. This is the wonder of the ongoing gospel recovery movement—we have reached an era where the foundational truth of Christianity is itself new, radical, unheard-of. Let’s play the song, brethren. Every week.
2. Rachel Kleppen – Netflix is Making it Harder to Be a Missionary. No matter if it’s streaming sports, TV shows, or family updates—it’s hard to do ministry if you’re still tied to your old life.
3. Onsi A. Kamel – Catholicism Made Me Protestant. “The magisterium of prior ages only multiplied the texts one had to interpret for oneself, for living bishops, it turns out, are as bad at reading as the rest of us.”
4. Ross Douthat – The Abortion Mysticism of Pete Buttigieg. The unapologetic grisliness of a Klopfer, or a Kermit Gosnell before him, haunts a Buttigiegian abortion politics more than it does a “safe, legal, rare” triangulation, because it establishes the most visceral of contrasts — between the mysticism required to believe that the right to life begins at birth and the cold and obvious reality that what our laws call a nonperson can still become a corpse.
5. Emily Belz – Five Years After Ebola. One small mission hospital in Liberia saved lives and paved the way for better healthcare in Africa.
6. Benjamin Wallace-Wells – David French, Sohrab Ahmari, and the Battle for the Future of Conservatism. Ahmari seems to see Donald Trump as having made a halfway break with the conservatism of the recent past—a conservatism embodied by French—which Ahmari wants to complete.
7. Joseph Pearce – In Defense of Archaisms. Archaisms renew the language; they are the means by which language is renovated and restored to its original splendor. It is the old things that make all things new.
