Whole Reason

Richard Mor­gan, active mem­ber of RichardDawkins.net and self-professed “Dawken­sian athe­ist” con­verted to Chris­tian­ity in 2008 after a long search for social accep­tance and truth.  Will he stop there?

He felt like Richard Dawkins ‘saved’ him from his many tries at find­ing mean­ing in faith.  His story is inter­est­ing.  He con­verted to Mor­monism at age 16, but as a Mor­mon mis­sion­ary, he lost his faith.  He then tried many reli­gions, includ­ing pos­i­tive think­ing, numerol­ogy, and Hinduism.

Check out the inter­view at Pre­mier Chris­t­ian Radio. 
This hour long inter­view cov­ers Morgan’s Jour­ney, as well as the
jour­ney of Ed Turner, an athe­ist who was also con­verted to athe­ism by
Dawkins et al., and remains atheist.

Read more…

Greg Stier over at the Chris­t­ian Post has a nice arti­cle enti­tled Michael Jackson’s Real Legacy.  Here’s the short­ened list, mod­i­fied by me:

1. He taught us all how to dance
2. He taught us all that money and cre­ative suc­cess don’t make you happy
3. He taught us that cultish and out­ward reli­gion doesn’t make us happy (Jehovah’s Witness)
4. He taught us that cos­metic surgery can go really bad
5. He taught us that abu­sive par­ent­ing can mess you up for a lifetime

But prob­a­bly, if you know and live with Bib­li­cal val­ues, you don’t have to end up like MJ, who in my esti­ma­tion, though an influ­en­tial and cre­ative genius, was not really suc­cess­ful by spir­i­tual mea­sure. King Solomon explored the many pos­si­ble routes to hap­pi­ness even more than MJ, and like a good sci­en­tist, recorded it all in the book of Eccle­si­astes.  His conclusion?

Then I real­ized that it is good and proper for a man to eat and drink,
and to find sat­is­fac­tion in his toil­some labor under the sun dur­ing the

Now all has been heard; here is the con­clu­sion of the mat­ter:
Fear God and keep his com­mand­ments, for this is the whole duty of man.

For God will bring every deed into judg­ment, includ­ing every hid­den thing, whether it is good or evil. (Eccle­si­astes 15:13–14)

Andrew Nor­man Wil­son (b1950), is an Eng­lish teacher and award win­ning writer.  His biog­ra­phy of Tol­stoy won the Whit­bread Award (now the Costa Book Awards) for best biog­ra­phy in 1988.

Wil­son entered Oxford on the path of ordi­na­tion in the Angli­can Church, but quit after the first year, and in the 1980’s came out as an athe­ist.  In 1991 he pub­lished a pam­phlet enti­tled Against Reli­gion, and wrote other his­tor­i­cal and fic­tion books crit­i­cal of reli­gion, includ­ing God’s Funeral: The Decline of Faith in West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion (2000), his 2004 Jesus: A Life, which is crit­i­cal of the his­toric­ity of the gospels, and his fic­tional piece My Name is Legion, a satire attack­ing both the British Press and the Angli­can Church.  But it seems that all those opin­ions may now be his FORMER posi­tions on such matters.

Read more…

From Albert Mohler’s Blog — I have never heard of this guy, but I will have to look into him.  He has pub­lished pro­lif­i­cally, includ­ing such titles as Inter­pret­ing the Bible and the Con­sti­tu­tion, The Idea of the Uni­ver­sity : A Reex­am­i­na­tion, The Ref­or­ma­tion of the Bible/The Bible of the Ref­or­ma­tion, Whose Bible Is It? A His­tory of the Scrip­tures Through the Ages, plus a cou­ple of series, includ­ing Sacred Writ­ings (which he edited, cov­er­ing all the major faiths), and The Chris­t­ian Tra­di­tion (looks like 5 vol­umes).  Any­way, I love his quote below about tradition:

Jaroslav Pelikan, one of the Chris­t­ian tradition’s great­est his­to­ri­ans of doc­trine, died Sat­ur­day, May 13, 2006, of lung can­cer. Pelikan had served for many years as Ster­ling Pro­fes­sor of His­tory at Yale Uni­ver­sity — hold­ing the university’s most pres­ti­gious pro­fes­so­r­ial title. He was also a pro­lific author, writ­ing more than thirty books, rang­ing from clas­si­cal stud­ies to con­sid­er­a­tions of Bach and Faust.…

[In] his great work The Chris­t­ian Tra­di­tion, he warned that tra­di­tion must be dis­tin­guished from tra­di­tion­al­ism: “Tra­di­tion is the liv­ing faith of the dead; tra­di­tion­al­ism is the dead faith of the living.”

Next to the NKJV/NRSV trans­la­tions, the Liv­ing Bible is one of my favorite para­phrase trans­la­tions (it leaves botch jobs like The Mes­sage in the dust — in the translator’s defense, how­ever, you can read an inter­view at CT).  The Liv­ing Bible is easy to read and faith­ful to the intended mean­ing of the texts, a great com­pan­ion for study.

I par­tic­u­larly like the early 70’s illus­trated ver­sion (cover shown) that includes lots of pics from the Jesus Move­me­ment, prob­a­bly one of the last big revival move­ments in the U.S.

Any­way, the orig­i­nal trans­la­tor has died, leav­ing quite a legacy.  He started Tyn­dale Pub­lish­ing because no one would print his para­phrase.  Read more at CT:

• Ken Tay­lor, Trans­la­tor of The Liv­ing Bible, Dies at 88
  Founder of Tyn­dale House Pub­lish­ers, Chris­t­ian Book­sellers Asso­ci­a­tion, was dri­ven by pas­sion for Bible.
• Ken Tay­lor: God’s Voice in the Ver­nac­u­lar
  Although his work has made him famous, he remained a retir­ing and mod­est figure.
• The Liv­ing Bible’s Mod­ern Hero
  Ken Taylor’s auto­bi­og­ra­phy shows a man who makes noth­ing of an extra­or­di­nary life.
• The Liv­ing Bible Reborn
  From the Liv­ing Bible to the New Liv­ing Translation.