Exploring Books, Life, and Writing
On November 15, 2012, I presented a paper at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society entitled “John Stott’s Influence Through Publishing.” I offer it here in five installments. The first installment can be found here.
Were there any limits on Stott’s influence? At least three can be mentioned.
Continue reading “Stott’s Influence (5): Limits and Legacy”
The saying goes (at least I say it) that as soon as a trend makes the cover of Time, it’s over. Well, self-publishing didn’t make the cover, but Time did give the topic a six-page article, highlighting a few writers who say they’ve made hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars self-publishing ebooks. Here’s just a few of my takeaways from the piece by Andrew Rice:
Continue reading “Millions in Ebooks”
On November 15, 2012, I presented a paper at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society entitled “John Stott’s Influence Through Publishing.” I offer it here in five installments. The first installment can be found here.
The fifth and final influence is Stott’s commitment to emphasize what we have in common as evangelicals rather than pound on our differences. As an evangelical statesman, he was of a decidedly vanishing breed. He never sought to divide Christians, to win over people to the particulars of all his viewpoints. Rather he worked to unite Christians in the basic convictions of the faith. He never aimed to win so much as to be winsome. His book
Evangelical Truth (first published in 1999) is one example of this.
Continue reading “Stott’s Influence (4): Common Ground”
Say you’re at lunch and someone starts chatting casually about the aseity of the Son. Well, you don’t want to be caught short. No, you want to be part of the conversation. You want to act like you know what’s going on by doing more than making knowing grunts of approval. But you really haven’t a clue what aseity (uh-SEE-i-tee) is. What do you do?
Continue reading “A Theological App for That”
On November 15, 2012, I presented a paper at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society entitled “John Stott’s Influence Through Publishing.” I offer it here in five installments. The first installment can be found here.
This leads to Stott’s third influence. In addition to encouraging respectful engagement with the culture at large and encouraging the life of the mind, John Stott promoted an understanding and appreciation of world Christianity. In fact, Stott was a World Christian long before it was fashionable to be a World Christian. I already mentioned the many university missions around the world. He had made over 15 trips overseas to dozens of countries before the Berlin ’66 Congress on World Evangelization where he gave three plenary Scripture expositions.
Continue reading “Stott’s Influence (3): World Christianity”
On November 15, 2012, I presented a paper at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society entitled “John Stott’s Influence Through Publishing.” I offer it here in five installments. The first installment can be found here.
Second, in addition to promoting constructive engagement with culture, he also (in contrast to much American evangelicalism) promoted an evangelicalism that was decidedly not anti-intellectual. He thoroughly endorsed the life of the mind, most explicitly in Your Mind Matters.
Continue reading “Stott’s Influence (2): The Life of the Mind”
On November 15, 2012, I presented a paper at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society entitled “John Stott’s Influence Through Publishing.” I offer it here in five installments.
To separate John Stott’s influence through publishing from his influence through other avenues is almost impossible. The emphases in his preaching, teaching and worldwide pastoral ministry were entirely consonant not only with his publishing efforts but also with his own institution building through the Langham Trust and the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity as well as his deep involvement in other institutions from the Lausanne Movement to the Tearfund to the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students–not to mention the Church of England.
Continue reading “Stott’s Influence (1): A British Anglican in American Evangelicalism”
Intelligent, informed, morally upright people have told me that anything on the web is public domain. They feel free to repost it, reprint it, resell it or re-use it in any way they wish without permission. Music, images, text–it’s all fair game.
Not so. The copyright laws apply to whatever is on the web in the same way they apply to whatever is in a newspaper, magazine, book, TV broadcast, radio or any other media. If it’s not fair use or if free use is not explicitly stated (as with something like wikicommons and wikimedia) then permission is required from the copyright owner. Here’s a couple more myths.
Continue reading “If It’s on the Web, It’s Free–FALSE”
In business, psychology, science and politics, successful metaphors should be as common as one-liners at a comedy convention, as numerous as drunks at a tailgate party, as bountiful as bribes in Chicago politics.
In advertising, GEICO, the insurance company, has successfully grabbed attention with its use of metaphor (or it’s close cousin, the analogy) in its “Happier Than” campaign.
Continue reading “I Is an Other (5): Metaphors at Work”
We can’t help but think and speak in metaphors. A hot temperature is the “high” for the day and a cold temperature is the “low.” The future is “ahead” and the past “behind.”
As James Geary says in I Is an Other, virtually the only way to understand something new is in reference to the old. When the theory of plate tectonics was first used to explain continental drift in the 1960s, the earth was compared to rice pudding–hard on the surface but pliable and liquid underneath (pp. 174-75). And electromagnetic fields were compared to two absolutely still corks floating separately in a bowl of water. Push one and the other moves. Not a perfect analogy, but helpful.
Yet not every metaphor works. Greary gives several examples. Here’s a headline from the Tulsa World:
Continue reading “I Is an Other (4): When Metaphors Strike Out”