After reading Why I Am Not A Christian I wanted to balance it out with the other side, though the intent of the books are very different. I had read Warranted a few years ago, but a second pass through helped me retain a whole lot more of Platinga’s idea. As barely an amateur philosopher … Book Review: Warranted Christian Belief
I totally made a big change in my life by increasing the font size of the body text and changing the font itself, to trebuchet MS. I like how readable the articles on mises.org are, so I took a cue from their designer. On a less successful note, I tried using (a very large version … Totally Useless Update About Fonts and Background Images
I may get some business cards printed up. Why? Because there have been a few instances where I wanted to give people my contact info for something writey-related and I had to resort to ye olde fashionede quill and parchment. It feels far less professional than handing over a decently designed business card. So here … Making the Call
Brett McCracken’s Hipster Christianity attempts to document the fusion of modern western Christianity with the hipster subculture. It’s mostly a descriptive book with a bit of prescriptive advice at the end that might ruffle some feathers, but for the most part McCracken -– a writer for spiritual hipster publication Relevant magazine –- offers germane insight … Book Review: Hipster Christianity
Invisible Creature started a series of posts on packaging design, then and now. Their first target is a box of Trix. It’s the case that packaging has gotten a lot more cluttered the past few decades. Empty space in design is seen as wasted real estate for marketing or information. Our eyes aren’t able to … Your Writing Is Terrible: Put Your Pen Down
Being the father of an almost-five year old and a book dweeb, I naturally enjoy reading her books with her — at least, as much as an adult can enjoy that sort of thing. The ones that are didactic are fairly innocuous in their delivery; they promote good manners, cooperation, learning, imagination, inventiveness (some of … Collectivist Kids’ Books
I received my copy of Hipster Christianity that I won from Mike Duran. When I unzipped the FedEx box, that one part from Handel’s Messiah echoed somewhere from the side of my house. You may recall that I won one of his handmade crosses a few months ago. Didn’t hear any Handel when the package … I Heard Jesus Smoked Cloves
On a non-literary note, I did some tidying up on the site, most noticeably in the graphics department. It’s 8-bit time! After listening to some Anamanaguchi I redid the “jd” logo in the corner, jiggered the icons (and the content) on the About page — and made all the images one sprite file. I also … Wizard Needs Food…Badly
I’ve informally made sure to keep this writey blog Christian-theology-free — and sometimes I skirt too close to the edge — but I’m not afraid to post in that area of interest if it has something to do with the engrossing use of language (I have a Venn diagram benignly hovering in my head). Enter … The Confession of Chalcedon
A longtime friend of mine, Seth W, wrote an e-book on killing your blog, a minimalist diatribe to encourage us to spend more time doing things rather than writing about them. This is coming from someone who has been blogging for nearly a decade and runs the Internet’s biggest metal sites (and who is singlehandedly … Kill Your Friends
Not so much a book as it is a compilation of essays and lectures, Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not A Christian encompasses, presumably, his reasoning for Christianity as a religious truth. I say “presumably” because I know Russell to have been a noted and influential philosopher, and that Why would follow in the tradition … Book Review: Why I Am Not A Christian
I came across You Write Like, where you can input text that you’ve written, a form of necromancy passes through your hard drive, and you are assigned a literary doppelganger. I input about a half-dozen bodies of text that I’ve done, from stories on here to a some paragraphs from my book. About four times … Your Writing Is Terrible: You Write Like A Dead Person
The other day in the car the family was listening to a song from Anberlin, called “Reclusion”. One of the lines in the chorus goes like this: Sins like skeletons are so very hard to hide. Nice line, but it had me thinking that this could be taken two different ways, which aren’t radically different … English Be Hard: Skeletal Punctuation
A few years ago I started the official site for Alvin Plantinga, a distinguished professor of philosophy at Notre Dame. I had contacted him about doing a site after reading Warranted Christian Belief (read it all for free here). There were papers and other things floating around the web that weren’t really consolidated into one … Planting(a) Seeds
I’ve been searching for ways to get the second draft of my book knocked out. Usually it’s “when I find time”, and this still holds true, but I will be finding more time in the next few months to actually pound this thing into submission. With that, I think I will be posting excerpts of … How the Gods Book
Earlier this month Rachelle Gardner gathered a lot of responses from authors about the one-sentence book pitch contest. I mean, she’s a literary agent that encourages comments her blog, so of course authors are going to flock in droves to get themselves noticed. She could post about the off-color of her pee in the morning … Gods In One Sentence
I got a new bike over Memorial Day weekend: a steel frame Trek 520. It’s actually very old, but it’s new to me — and it’s my first road bike. I was using a mountain bike heft to my bus stop, which was certainly workable but not ideal in suburban/urban terrain. It was also a … Memorial Day 2010 Bike Ride
I was pretty excited to read this as it comes recommended by a lot of proponents of the Austrian school of economics. Despite knowing about Henry Hazlitt’s Economics In One Lesson, I didn’t know much of the content. I believe the title is misleading, because the lesson is actually just one sentence long. Hazlitt humorously … Book Review: Economics In One Lesson
One of my favorite philosophical paradoxes is the Ship of Theseus. If I have a ship and I gradually replace the parts of the ship as they break or suffer from wear and tear, it’s possible that eventually I will have a ship with none of the original parts. The real ship of Theseus — … Paradox in Character Development
I hadn’t heard of O’Connors Wise Blood until it mysteriously materialized in my to-read list. This might not be remarkable except for the fact that the mid-century book is highly rated both critically and general readership-wise. Maybe my cultural connection to the literary world and its history is still in question. The story follows Hazel … Book Review: Wise Blood