Happy Friday! May the Lord be with you and bless you today.

(Yesterday on the blog: Books To Read As You Prepare for Easter)
When Evil Is Called Good
Carl Trueman analyzes three recent news stories. “Taken together, these three news stories point to the comprehensive destabilizing of society at which the revolution aims. The family must be dismantled; biology must fall to gender ideology; dissenters must be discredited and vilified.”
Fearing Fear Itself
“This past month, as the world has watched and prayed while the Russian army has invaded the sovereign nation of Ukraine, images of young mothers and children having to flee to safety, or hunker down in bomb shelters have flooded our media, imaginations, and our hearts. The courage and tenacity of the Ukrainian people have been inspiring. But fear is a powerful and all-consuming weapon. Not just overseas and in far away lands, but even in our own first-world lives of comfort and affluence we can be easily overwhelmed by fear and worry.”
Preaching Series: Six Strengths
Peter Mead: “Some churches always preach sermons in a series. Some churches never do. Here are six strengths of well-planned series…”
Pain From the Church Heals in the Church
“This is the beauty of the body of Christ: we do not have to pretend we are put-together people. Believers endure the trials of this life together, which means we also have a front-row seat to spiritual growth gifted through them.”
Progressive Christians Love THIS Fallacy
I expect you’ve heard someone rely on this fallacy before.
Died: Gary North, Who Saw Austrian Economics in the Bible and Disaster on the Horizon
Christianity Today has an interesting obituary for Gary North who recently died. “Gary North, a leading Christian Reconstructionist who argued for the biblical basis of free market economics and urged people to prepare for societal collapse, has died at 80.”
Flashback: Four Good Reasons to Read Good Books
Reading is a pleasure worth learning to love and pursue, even if it requires some effort at first. However, whether it is pleasure or pain, commit yourself to read to know, read to grow, read to lead and read to love.

Christian friendships are among the sweetest gifts God gives his people. —Sam Emadi

Every now and again I sit down to write a review for a book and realize I am really under-equipped to review it well. I might have read it, enjoyed it, and benefitted from it, but lack the knowledge or expertise to confidently analyze it. This is exactly the case with Andrew Wilson’s Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West.

The book’s big idea is that the year “1776, more than any other year in the last millennium, is the year that made us who we are.” In this case, the “us” refers to those who live in what we might call the modern, industrialized West. Of course when we hear “1776” we probably think first of the American Revolution. And when we learn that the author is an Englishman we might think we know what he is going to say. But we would be misled, for his point is not to argue that everything went wrong when America threw off its loyalty to the crown. What he argues is that if we want to understand who we are, we need to understand that year, for “it was a year that witnessed seven transformations taking place—globalization, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the Great Enrichment, the American Revolution, the rise of post-Christianity, and the dawn of Romanticism.” Together these transformations “remade the world and profoundly influenced the way we think about God, life, the universe, and everything.” Of course each of the transformations has roots that extended much deeper in history and none of them took place neatly between January and December of that year. Yet each of them has some distinct connection to 1776.
As for those of us who live in the modern, industrialized West, Wilson describes this society as one that, “relative to others past and present, is … WEIRDER: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, Ex-Christian, and Romantic.” In each of these seven descriptions, we are outliers compared to the great majority of people past or present who have lived in non-WEIRDER times and places. “The vast majority of people in human history have not shared our views of work, family, government, religion, sex, identity, or morality, no matter how universal or self-evident we may think they are.”
The book means to prove that our WEIRDER society can best be understood, or perhaps only be understood, in light of the year 1776. To do that Wilson first defends his use of WEIRDER as an apt description of you and me and the people around us. And I think few of us would seriously argue that our society is anything but Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, Ex-Christian, and Romantic (provided we understand “romantic” in the sense he means it rather than assuming he means that we are obsessed with wooing and swooning in an amorous way).
Having defended his acronym, he spends one chapter on each of them, showing how that descriptor is appropriate and how it connects to 1776. He does this a little out-of-order in relation to the acronym, opting to approach them as W-D-E-E-I-R-R. And it’s right about here that I realize I am under-equipped to really provide rigorous analysis. I resonated with his descriptions and enjoyed his observations and appreciated his arguments. But in the end, I do not know enough about history, and especially Western history around 1776, to know if his arguments hold. That is a level of analysis that will need to wait for people whose historical credentials far exceed my own. And I will legitimately look forward to reading such reviews and analyses.
This would probably be an appropriate juncture to point out that the book was positively endorsed by Thomas Kidd and Mark Noll, both of whom are true historians. I will also point out that two of the book’s endorsements used the word “verve” to describe the author’s efforts—possibly a first in Christian publishing, but also a good descriptor since it really is an enjoyable and lively look at a subject that in the hands of the wrong author could easily be drab or boring.
With his analysis of each of the letters in the acronym behind him, Wilson closes with two chapters that ask and answer questions like these: “What challenges and opportunities emerge from Westernization or Romanticism or Industrialization, and what should we do about them? How should Christians act in an Ex-Christian culture? What does faithful Christianity look like in the shadow of 1776? And here, I believe, we can draw a great deal of wisdom from an obvious source: faithful Christianity in 1776. How did believers in this turbulent and transformative era respond to what was happening around them? And what can we learn?” These chapters provide a solid place to end and provide an opportunity for personal application.
I very much enjoyed reading Remaking the World. It is an enjoyable book, a well-paced book, and, dare I say it, one written with verve. It takes on an audacious thesis and, as far as I can tell (even while admitting I’m entirely unqualified to judge), one the author defends well. I think you’re likely to enjoy it just as much as I did.
Buy from Amazon

I’m glad to say that I think I’ve turned a bit of a corner in my recovery from whatever I picked up in Zambia. I hope to be back to normal within a few days.

You’ll find a good little collection of Kindle deals today. (Also, if you’re into Agatha Christie, a whole lot of her books are on sale today only.)
A Case for Christian Optimism
“Once the preserve of the middle-aged and elderly, ‘declinism’ has reached the mainstream in the Western world. The nagging feeling that life is on a downward trend, that things are not what they once were, that our future is less bright than our past, now plagues public discourse and popular media.” Like Andrew, I feel quite optimistic about the future.
Seven Blessings for Empty-Handed Believers
“Empty-handedness is where the blessing of God begins. People who feel they have something to offer God come to him with their hands full, but as long as our hands are full, we are not in a position to receive.”
“The next Pope will be John XXIV.” Will he?
Leonardo De Chirico follows some clues to suggest who may eventually replace Pope Francis.
Advice to My Younger Self
From her current vantage point in life, Donna tells what advice she would offer to her younger self.
Enduring Lessons from the Rise and Fall of Mars Hill
Gary Millar only just got around to listening to The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill and offers some enduring lessons from the whole Mars Hill situation (or fiasco or phenomenon or…).
God, Our Hiding Place
“The summer slump is over. Children have returned to school. Similar to the difficulty of moving a long-parked train, the normal cycles of life are slowly gaining momentum. And in the midst of all of this, many patterns in the life of the pastor are gaining inertia. As we take on more and more responsibilities, the pressure to crowd out the important with the urgent lurks in every staff meeting, inbox, and calendar update.”
Flashback: My Own Little Paradise in an Ocean of Ugliness
We genuinely do make progress, yet always know that many decades of struggle in this life will be but baby steps compared to the mighty leap we will experience when we are finally perfected in the moment of death.

There are no ‘if’s’ in Gods world. And no places that are safer than other places. The center of His will is our only safety- let us pray that we may always know it. —Betsie ten Boom