Bob

At Least It's Over, May 21 2004

I can accept a movie treatment compressing a book's dialog or leaving out scenes to make a story watchable in under three hours. We've all got to go the bathroom eventually, after all. What I can't understand is why Peter Jackson would actually *add* scenes and new fluff dialog to this already interminably long movie. We get scenes of Liv Tyler as Arwen emoting with her father Elrond, Gollum successfully driving a wedge between Frodo and Sam (Say it isn't so!), Aragorn et al. in a battle of words with the spirits of the mountains and on and on. And pretty much all the scenes from Tolkien's wonderful original are padded with useless new dialog.

Someone out there is bound to say,… Read more

Admirable effort, Nov 30 2003

Flint's rigorous, scholarly defense of the Molinist account of Divine Providence is one of the more welcome additions to the latter-day debate over this tendentious issue. Flint has given us a book brimming over with rigorous argument, served in a style of writing that is much more readable than one could ever expect in such a densely philosophical work.

Flint's work will serve as an excellent introduction to Molinism for the patient layman unfamiliar with the literature. It also goes a long way in explicating why Molinists believe as they do, and will force philosophers in other traditions to sharpen their arguments against Molinism. One other contribution to the current debate on… Read more

What Elephant in the Living Room?, Nov 8 2003

David Limbaugh's "Persecution" forces us to look squarely up the trunk of the elephant in the liberal living room: the "secret" that the modern-day heirs of a political tradition built on fighting for justice, tolerance, and freedom have become some of the most unjust, intolerant oppressors in recent American history, at least where Christianity is concerned. Limbaugh documents case after case of religious discrimination perpretrated by liberals against Christians, all in the name of tolerance and open mindedness.

We might expect a book entitled "Persecution" to be only another mindless rant from a stereotypical uneducated fundamentalist. But this is not the case here. Limbaugh does… Read more