Ruminations & Reviews
Ruminations & Reviews
  • Home
  • Recommended Reading
  • On the Table
  • About
Browsing Category
Clarity
Blog Clarity Lifestyle Thinking Truth

Life!

Funny how one or two (seemingly) random things—reading a quote from Chaucer (no less) at the same time a lyric from Five for Fighting is playing—can suddenly jar and drive your thinking in an unexpected direction: “The life so short, the craft so long to learn.” “I’m forty five for a moment. The sea is high and I’m heading into a crisis, chasing the years of my life.”

Continue reading
Reading time: 1 min
Blog Clarity Reading Thinking Truth

I Sat Among My Books Last Night

Penned this while I waited on the storm last night. Nothing special poetically, but a grand lesson.

I sat among my books last night
and marveled as I mused
at just how much was written there
and how little I’d infused—
of fact and figure, trope and truth,
of wisdom gained at crushing cost,
and as I sat among my books
I mourned my sorry loss.

Continue reading
Reading time: 1 min
Blog Clarity Classic Preaching Truth

Preacher Tone: Let’s Not!

Might you hazard a guess at what I have in mind by this expression: “preacher tone”?

If you reckoned on something like contrived showiness, an overly-stilted formality, an exaggerated intonation, all delivered in some strange rhythm and pattern, then you’re right on target.

I’m unsure of the history of this phenomenon, but I’m quite sure that the sooner we preachers get over it, the better. Where have we gotten this peculiar idea that our preaching voice should be, must be, something quite other than and decidedly odder than our everyday voice? Has tradition bequeathed this to us? Has the cult of personality in American religion helped establish it? Is there some element of idolatrous worship involved in sustaining its artificial life? These are painful but pivotal questions.

Continue reading
Reading time: 3 min
Blog Clarity Precision Truth

A Lesson from the “Oxford Comma”

Okay, I own up! The tag-line for this site—“A Blog About Theology, Thinking, Reading, Writing, and Teaching”—does have an “Oxford comma,” aka the “serial comma.”

The “Oxford comma” is the comma placed before the word “and” in a list of three or more items for the purpose of clarification. The “Grammarly Blog” offers this humorous example of its merit:

I love my parents, Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty.

Continue reading
Reading time: 2 min

Recent Posts

Life!

22 April 2020

I Sat Among My Books Last Night

12 April 2020

Preacher Tone: Let’s Not!

25 March 2020

A Lesson from the “Oxford Comma”

8 May 2019

We Watch Every Year!

11 December 2015

Calendar

January 2021
S M T W T F S
 12
3456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930
31  
« Apr    

Tag Cloud

Apologetics Clarity Culture Doctrine Faithfulness Good Fight Gospel Perseverance Postmodernism Precision Reading Thinking Truth

© 2020 B. Spencer Haygood, Jr.
Designed by Premiumcoding