Jaime Escalante died last week. He was the outstanding algebra teacher portrayed by Edward James Olmos in the movie “Stand and Deliver.”
Ever wonder why you don’t hear about his program anymore, anywhere?
Andrew Klavan provides the answer at his blog, recommending the book, The War Against Hope.
Elizabeth Abbott has the interesting and ugly history of sugar in a new book.
Mark Tooley at Front Page Magazine reviews Between Faith and Compromise by Momchil Metodiev, a new book about Communist infiltration in the World Council of Churches in the 1970s and ’80s.
But a new book by a Bulgarian author reveals that the KGB and its Bulgarian intelligence affiliate exploited the Bulgarian Orthodox Church for direct influence on the WCC and the Conference of European Churches. In “Between Faith and Compromise,” Bulgarian historian Momchil Metodiev chronicles how the Soviets and their Bulgarian proxies employed the Bulgarian Orthodox and WCC to promote Soviet strategic goals globally.
You kids aren’t old enough to remember this, but back in those days (and back in the ’60s, in my own experience), we brainless Fundamentalists were screaming from the rooftops that the WCC was shot through with Communists. Smarter, more sophisticated churchmen laughed at our ignorance and bigotry.
Of course, we were completely right.
And of course, we will never get credit for it.
I think I can give a rough outline of church history, and I don’t mean the founding of my own church. The BBC has a six DVD set which promises to fill in many of the details I would miss. It’s called A History of Christianity: the First Three Thousand Years. Hosted by Dairmaid MacCulloch, professor of history of the church and fellow at St. Cross College, Oxford, this historical overview looks well-worth your time, though I can’t tell if MacCulloch will lead viewers down a dark road of doubting the supernatural and God’s testimony in the world or leave the faith examined but uncondemned. After watching only the first disc, I believe he will remain respectful, if nothing else.
Here’s a list of disc titles:
Program 1: The First Christianity
Program 2: Catholicism: The Unpredictable Rise of Rome
Program 3: Orthodoxy: From Empire to Empire
Program 4: Reformation: The Individual Before God
Program 5: Protestantism: The Evangelical Explosion
Program 6: God in Dock
I received the first disc for review. Ambrose Video is distributing the DVDs and has a trailer on their product page.
“The First Christianity” was beautiful filmed, as you’d expect. Professor MacCulloch says he won’t shy away from controversy, but he doesn’t delve deeply into it either. His explanation of the major argument over the divine vs. human nature of Jesus did not attempt to settle it with Scripture. He only presented the proponents with their claims and described how the arguments fell out.
In this part of the series, MacCulloch describes what he calls the eastern road out of Jerusalem. Continue reading A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years
That’s not how we typically think of it, but it’s as true as the day you were born. Paul Tripp talks about his new book, What Did You Expect?.
Paul Tripp- What makes “What Did You Expect?” different than other marriage books from Crossway on Vimeo.
Sad to say, it is no surprise that the massacre of Antioch is barely reported in many recent Western histories of the Crusades. Steven Runciman gave it eight lines, Hans Eberhard Mayer gave it one, and Christopher Tyerman, who devoted several pages to lurid details of the massacre of Jerusalem during the First Crusade, dismissed the massacre of Antioch in four words. Karen Armstrong devoted twelve words to reporting this massacre, which she then blamed on the crusaders since it was their dire threat that had created a “new Islam” with a “desperate determination to survive.” Armstrong also noted that because Baibars [the Mamluk commander] was a patron of the arts, he “was not simply a destroyer . . . [but also] a great builder.”
This excerpt from page 232 of Rodney Stark’s God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades
He identifies four great lies that have become common wisdom in recent decades, all of which (he insists) are demonstrably false: Continue reading God's Battalions, by Rodney Stark
Great Irish Lives is a collection of Irish obituaries from a people who appear to relish the news of someone stepping into the great beyond. Suzanne Strempek Shea, writing the review, quotes from one obit, “We believe there is no doubt that Mr O’Connell expired on Saturday, the 15th of this month, at Genoa. He yielded up his latest breath at the distance of many hundred miles from the remains of [his] humble dwelling….” She then writes:
Don’t let language stop you from reading, and learning. The obituary of James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, Jan. 13, 1941, includes the story of his meeting as a student with W.B. Yeats, whose obit resides nearby. The back-and-forth: “We have met too late,” the budding novelist said, “you are too old to be influenced by me,” to which the poet answered, “Never have I encountered so much pretension with so little to show for it.”
Philip Christman reviews What Are Intellectuals Good For? by George Scialabba. He summarizes it. “One thing they’re not good for, argues Scialabba, is constructing secular substitutes for religion. Whether they’re Marx’s, Kant’s, or someone else’s, accounts of justice, human nature, or rights that try to specify once and for all the nature of human life are doomed to failure.”
In vain, men set themselves up as the mouths of god.
Susan Wise Bauer has a new world history book out. This is the second one, The History of the Medieval World: from the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade. Howling Frog Books has a good review, noting this is world history, not western civilization history. She writes:
Medieval history and literature is a favorite subject of mine, so it was a bit dismaying to realize how ignorant I am about nearly all of it. I particularly appreciated the chapters on Korean history, which is probably not very well-known to most people outside Korea–certainly not to me. The history of the Chinese empires and the great influence they exercised over so much of the east is fascinating. The many ever-changing kingdoms of India are terribly complex and difficult to follow, and I admire the effort that must have gone into making them comprehensible.
Many more reviews of this book are linked from a post on Dr. Bauer’s blog.