Those who walk down the middle of the road, it is said, are likely to get run over by both sides. That is where Garwood Anderson has chosen to daringly place himself in his Paul’s New Perspective. In the current debate on justification between those who hold to the Traditional Protestant Perspective (TPP) and the New Perspective on Paul (NPP), Anderson charts a third way.
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Cracking the Writer’s Block 4: Life Issues
Ron Brackin tells us, “Writers block occurs when a writer has nothing to say. Unfortunately not all writers experience it.”
But you are not like that. No, no, no. Obviously, you have something to say, even if you are not quite sure at the moment what that is. So how do you get unstuck?
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Cracking the Writer’s Block 3: Playing Balderdash
Sometimes our writing is stuck because we don’t know where to start. For some of us, we need to know where we are going to end up before we can begin. And if we don’t, the ink has run out, our pencil is down to a nub, our muse is silent, and the battery to our laptop has died.
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Cracking the Writer’s Block 2: Quick Tips
So you are a writer with lots of ideas, but don’t know where to start. Or you have no ideas, with the same result. What do you do? Here are a few simple ideas to get you going.
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Cracking the Writer’s Block 1: Fear, Success and Life
A publishing colleague of mine who worked with our book printers was fond of telling me, “With all the things that can go wrong in producing a book, it’s amazing the ink ever hits the page.”
What’s true for printers is true in spades for writers. With so many reasons for writer’s block it’s a miracle anyone writes anything.
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Intuition, Snap Judgments and Gut Reactions
When Gianfranco Becchina offered to sell an ancient statue to the Getty Museum for $10 million in 1983, the Getty conducted extensive (even microscopic) analysis before agreeing to buy. Afterward a few experts on viewing the statue had instantaneous misgivings, though they had a hard time articulating exactly why. Yet the gut reactions were right and the time-consuming analysis was wrong. The statue eventually proved to be a fake.
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The Man in the High Castle
What would it be like for white Americans to be second-class citizens in their own country? What if we had to accommodate ourselves to a dominant culture that wasn’t native to us? What if we had to negotiate different values, different customs, different ways of speaking, and a lower economic status than we are used to–all with the vague fog of inferiority hanging over us constantly as we and others compare us to a superior race? What would it be like? How would it feel?
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A Missing Element in Knowing God
One of the most significant passages in one of the most significant books for the church in the last fifty years is this:
What were we made for? To know God.
What aim should we set ourselves in life? To know God
What is the “eternal life” that Jesus gives? Knowledge of God. “This is eternal
life: that they may know you, the only true god, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (Jn 17:3).
What is the best thing in life bringing more joy, delight and contentment than
anything else? Knowledge of God. “This is what the Lord says: ‘Let not the wise
man boast of his wisdom or the strong man boast of his strength or the rich man boast of his riches, but let him who boasts boast about this: that he understands and knows me’ ” (Jer 9:23-24).*
I’ll Have a Cliché with a Twist, Please
My wife murders clichés. But because these are unpremeditated, we should probably reduce the charges to manslaughter.
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Getting Mad at God
I told them it was okay to be mad at God. Afterward I got a phone call.
I spoke to over a hundred college students about the book of Ruth. After Naomi’s husband and two sons died in Moab, she told her daughters-in-law (Ruth and Orpah) not go back to Israel with her “because the LORD’s hand has turned against me!” On her return Namoi told the women in her hometown, “Don’t call me Naomi. . . . Call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my life very bitter” (Ruth 1:13, 20).
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