Elliot Ritzema's Blog, page 10

Princes and Gods and Kings of Egypt: A Review

A couple of years ago, I edited a commentary on Exodus. I had never taken the time to study the book that deeply before, and I enjoyed the experience. So when I heard that there was a new volume coming out in the Kregel Exegetical Library series on Exodus, I decided to pick it up.

A Commentary on Exodus is by Duane A. Garrett, who teaches at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He has previously published Song of Songs in the Word Biblical Commentary, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Song...

Alcohol from A to Z: A Review

On the day that I turned 21,some friends took me out to celebrate. Even though it is customaryto have something alcoholic on the day that you can imbibe legally, on that day I really just felt like a milkshake. So that’s what I had.

That early experiencesums up my relationship to alcoholic drinks for the early part ofmy adult life. I liked themall right, but most of the time I could take themor leave them. I was too cheap to getthe expensive stuff, and getting drunk hasnever beenattractive to...

Interior Design for the Literature Lover: A Review

I review a lot of books here, but I don’t think I have ever reviewed a book on interior design. However, I was drawnto Lisa Borgnes Giramonti‘s bookNovel Interiors: Living in Enchanted Rooms Inspired by Literatureby my love of classic novels. What keeps me reading a novel is mostly the plot and characters, but what makes me return to a novel again (or continue reading more works by the same author) is the setting, the world the author has created. Giramonti and photographer Ivan Terestchenko...

Taught by Children: A Review of Small Talk

As a married man with no children, I am probably not the primary intended audience for Amy Julia Becker’s Small Talk: Learning from My Children about What Matters Most. But I had read some of her writing on Christianity Today’s her.meneutics blog as well as her own blog, Thin Places, and I enjoyed her writing style, so I decided to pick this book up.

Small Talkis arranged chronologically, beginning when Becker and her husband Peterhad two small children and she waspregnant with their third. It...

Christian Faith in the Future: A Review of Renaissance by Os Guinness

I have long enjoyed the writings of cultural critic Os Guinness. The first book I read of his, in college, wasThe Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life (a good time to read such a book). Since then, I’ve readTime for Truth,The Gravedigger File, A Free People’s Suicide,and two books that he compiled as curriculum material for the Trinity Forum:The Great Experiment andDoing Well and Doing Good.I haven’t agreed with everything he’s written, but he is always a thought-prov...

Spurgeon and the Lazy Monk

One of the more consistently popular posts on this blog is this one from 2012, in which I showed the two versions of Charles Spurgeon’s famous illustration that compares the gospel to a lion. In honor of the fact that the Spurgeon Commentary New Testament Letters collection is now compiled and should be on its way to customers soon, I thought I would share another one of Spurgeon’s illustrations that he told multiple times.

The point is that being spiritual should not be opposed to being pract...

Be Anxious for Nothing: A Review

Modern Americansare able to control vastly more of our lives than our ancestors could. There is little chance of a large-scale epidemic, most of us don’t personally experiencethe effects of war, and while natural disasters continue, most of us are more likely to have property destroyed in them than actually lose our lives.

But as our ability to control the world around us has grown, our penchant for worrying about the shrunken share of life that we cannot control has also grown. And for Americ...

ReFrame ReView: Living Out of the Christian Story

Many Christians are wondering how their faith can possibly relate to their everyday life. Often we see our faith as private—something that we do in our spare time or on the weekends, not something that shapes how we work and play every day. Even if we do bring faith into our everyday lives, it can seem tacked on. It is as if faith is limited to certain activities, and not something that comes out of the core of who we are.

To help us learn how faith relates to all of life, the folks at the Reg...

Evangelii Gaudium Is Not All about Economics: A Review

Around this time last year, there was a flurry of media coverage about Pope Francis’s first major writing of his pontificate, the apostolic exhortationEvangelii Gaudium(“The Joy of the Gospel”). While he had previously released an encyclical,Lumen Fidei(“The Light of Faith”), that was largely the work of his predecessor, Benedict XVI. WhenEvangelii Gaudium released, many saw it as an indication of what was important to this new pope.

Unfortunately, muchof the media attention thatEvangelii Gaud...

Logos 6 Has Launched!

If you read this blog regularly (or know me personally), youknow that I work at Faithlife, the makers of Logos Bible Software. Today, we announced the latest version of that software: Logos 6!

The list of cool new features is too long for a single blog post, and it has already been laid out very well elsewhere. Here I’ll just note a few that I’m most excited about:

1. The Ancient Literature Tool

The Bible wasn’t written in a vacuum, and hasn’t existed in a vacuum since it was written. It both dr...