Andy Unedited
Exploring Books, Life, and Writing
When Phyllis and I got engaged, I found out just how different Catholics and Protestants were. I had been raised Catholic, served as an altar boy, ate fish on Friday, said the rosary, memorized the catechism, prayed the Stations of the Cross, sang Gregorian Chant in the choir, and had twelve years of Catholic education …
One of the besetting sins of churchgoers throughout the ages has been to take verses out of context. We show disrespect for and do damage to the Bible when we act like it is a grab bag of timeless truths we can rummage through at will. We mislead others and ourselves about what the authors …
In the last century millions were killed in genocide, a hundred million in armed conflicts, fifty million more in political purges. Has Jesus, acknowledged as the most influential person in world history, really made any difference? Thomas Cahill begins to answer this question in Desire of the Everlasting Hills by considering the written record of …
Is democracy worth fighting for and even dying for? Does it need greater goals than itself? What should be the shape of our social order? In an era gone by, Christian thought leaders believed they had a public role in answering such questions, and the public thought they did too. In 1943, as the Allies …
We all know the story. Saul persecuted the early Christians until, in a flash of light from the sky, God knocked him off his horse. He heard a voice call to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” And who was speaking? “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.” And that’s how Saul turned …
You’ve seen the pop-up adds and click bait many times. “He predicted the Great Recession. Now look what stock he says to buy!” What few ask, however, is this. What other predictions did he make that failed? Were there dozens? Hundreds? No one remembers those. But if you make lots of such guesses, then odds …
We often consider unbelief and doubt to be enemies of faith. After all, if we perpetually embrace them, we never embrace God. But a very different response can also be the enemy—certainty. As Tobias Wolf said, “Certainty is one of the greatest spiritual problems of our time.”* When we are absolutely sure of what we …
T. S. Eliot famously said, “Good writers borrow. Great writers steal.” As it turns out, Pablo Picasso and Oscar Wilde are also credited with saying the same thing—which perhaps proves how true the saying is. While we actually can’t find any evidence that Eliot made this statement, he did say say something very much like …
With the upcoming broadcast on PBS of the final episode of Les Misérables, I offer an excerpt from A Deeper Look at James by my wife, Phyllis, and me. We compare the musical with Victor Hugo’s book, but the same is true for this new six-part Masterpiece Theatre production. While I posted this six years …
Benjamin Dreyer is the Stephen Colbert of grammar, style, and punctuation—informative while always being cheerfully acerbic. When he tells us in Dreyer’s English to never use actually, it is “because, seriously, it serves no purpose I can think of except to irritate.” When offering examples, Dreyer also gives us cause to smile. Honorary titles should …