Ligon Duncan drew my attention yesterday to a review by Diarmaid Macculloch of R. I. Moore's new book on medieval heresy and persecution. I have not yet read the book but these are my immediate reactions to the review. 1. The review itself is a top-notch church history lesson. I am reminded once...

Before my video interview with Dr. Packer last May, the two of us sat in a room at Regent discussing one of the passions which we both share - no, not bashing chinless upper class English schoolboys but rather our appreciation of the English Puritans - in relation to recent and contemporary...

I recently joined the Advisory Board of the Tolle Lege Institute , a great organisation committed to the translation and distribution of Reformed literature in Polish. The driving force behind the group is Dariusz Brycko who can be seen here giving a lecture on Machen on education. The Institute's...

As it is a rest day in the Tour, and Team Sky/Bradley Wiggins are in a very strong position before hitting the mountain stages this week, I find myself with a few hours to spare. In the time since Paul Levy's challenge last week, I have noticed that Iain Murray has published a review of the Lloyd-...

I will certainly be responding to the Graham Harrison review which seems to confirm I am about as welcome these days in Wales as I am in Illinois. As the Emperor Gaius once declared, Let them hate me etc. etc. It is great to see that 'scholastic Reformed Orthodoxy' is still a pejorative term out...

This week's Back to Basics is on the Lord's Supper. The Lord's Supper is one of the most basic activities of the church. More ink hit more pages in the Reformation on this topic than on any other, including justification and authority. Yet the proportion of material on the issue produced in...

Anthony Bradley has asked a thought-provoking question : why is 'Reformed' more often associated with Baptists than Presbyterians in popular parlance in the current climate? A number of thoughts come to mind. 'Reformed' as a term has expanded its meaning over the years to the point where it is no...

Practical Ethics , a webpage based at the University of Oxford, has an interesting post on research that suggests a society's crime rate will be higher where there is widespread rejection of the notion of hell. Statistics are statistics, of course, and so the findings will no doubt be contested;...

Listening to my lectures on Medieval Church on iTunes, Justin Taylor heard me make this statement which is now, ten years on, somewhat amusing: "I'm recommending GR Evans on Bernard of C based on her reputation, even though I haven't read it yet. I'm playing the percentage game, as it were." It...

A friend brought my attention to the following trailer and promotional website this morning. It is hard to imagine how a film of Augustine's life could fail to be interesting. And with Franco Nero in the cast, we can assume it will be excellent. We can only hope that he plays his character as a...

For this week's Back to Basics, I have returned to a hardy perennial of Christian literature. The recent comments by J.I. Packer that John Bunyan had come to join John Owen and Richard Baxter in first equal position in his list of Puritans sent me back to Pilgrim's Progress once more. It is some...

The Atlantic has an interesting article by a member of the Religious Right on the problems with the Religious Right. Well worth a read, whatever your personal convictions might be.

There are a few items of interest in the news today. First, Westminster Bookstore is offering the Dispatches from the Front DVDs at a discount price. This series is quite superb and would make excellent additions to a church library and would serve well for Sunday School or mid-week meetings. They...

In the aftermath of the review of G. R. Evans Reformation book, a number of people have emailed the Ref21 desk to ask about recommended textbooks on the Reformation. I have taught Reformation for nearly twenty years, at both university and seminary, but my philosophy of how to choose a textbook has...

I.V.P. have responded to my recent review of G.R. Evans, The Roots of the Reformation , and have asked if I would post it on the blog. I am happy to do so: Dear friends, Recently, concerns have arisen among some of our readership in response to a review by Carl Trueman, regarding inaccuracies and...

The first book I want to recommend in the Back to Basic series of posts is Melvin Tinker's new book, a treatment of divine providence, Intended for Good: the Providence of God (IVP UK). This volume does not appear to have an American distributor but can be purchased from The Book Depository ...

The news of the seeming impending conversion of Jason Stellman to Roman Catholicism will no doubt come as a shock to many who, in the small world of confessional Presbyterianism, probably know of him best either as the man who led the prosecution of Peter Leithart in the PCA's Presbytery of the...

I hope in the next few weeks to post on some books of basic theology and discipleship, not for readers to recommend to younger Christians in their churches (though I hope they will do so) but to encourage Ref21 readers to read them for themselves. It is too easy to become mesmerised by complexity...

A friend sent me this link earlier today. It raises a number of issues in my mind, a bit like seeing a dog walking on two legs. One instinctively knows it is strange and feels it is wrong; but as with many such well-intentioned things, it can be hard to articulate precisely why. Well, here is my...

A group of Polish Reformed believers are raising funds to translate Machen's important little book, Christianity and Liberalism , into Polish. Anyone interested in helping with this project can find out how at this link to the Tolle Lege Insitute . The book didn't sell more than 30 million copies...

The interview with Dr. Packer is now online . The comment on Lloyd-Jones to which I referred in an earlier post is not in the interview -- must have happened over lunch. But the testimony to God's grace in his own life, his reflections on the Puritans and on Lloyd-Jones and his advice to young...

First, it seems only polite to thank all the baptists who wrote to me yesterday to express appreciation for my Baptist History 101 lesson. Believe me, the pleasure was all mine. And you all spelled my name correctly, which was very touching. To be honest, just knowing that my diversion of you from...

Danny Hyde's excellent book on infant baptism is available at a discount price from the Westminster bookstore. A very readable and thoughtful piece, it would make a most excellent gift for Nine Marks interns, Mark Dever, that special Gospel Coalition member in your life or any other examples of...

Apparently, a church in Oregon is suing a former member and her daughter for defamation on a blog. Apart from the difficulty of mounting a successful suit for defamation under the US's admirably lax defamation laws (where not only factual error but deliberate malice must be proved), the whole idea...