Christian_apologetics on George's Blog

Orthodoxy

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:31:48 -0500

Summary

Chesterton wrote this as a companion piece to his early work ‘Heretic’. He wishes to document his own views and how he got to them.

I did try to found a little heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.

Chesterton reminds me of a Churchill or Benjamin Franklin in the way in which his ratio of memorable sentences per page asymptotically approaches 1. Every paragraph has gems that beg to be plastered on some living room wall in garish curly-q font:

Pensées

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:27:50 -0500

Summary

Blaise Pascal was a philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. Just another run of the mill renaissance man. Pensées, or ‘Thoughts’ are a collection of loosely collected writings put together posthumously. What starts as a series of somewhat disconnected thoughts ends in a fairly coherent apologetic for faith in general and Christian faith in particular.

Thoughts

I did not research this book before reading it. I saw this quote:

The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of…

The Case for Christ

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:18 -0500

Lee Strobel earned a law degree from Yale and was a crime reporter back in the 80s. Long story short his wife became a Christian and so he goes on a spiritual quest to see if there is anything to Christianity. Strobel sets the book up by saying he was going to use his hardnosed skeptic journalistic approach that he used on crime to get to the bottom of the evidence, historical or otherwise that supports Christianity. He proceeds to interview a lot of the leading evangelical theologians and historians asking them hard questions and recording their answers. As such this book is a good summary of the state of the art of Christian apologetics. Broken into 3 parts it starts by compiling the best arguments for the historicity and facticity of the gospels. This section sets out to prove the following: