David M. Hodges ⁽¹⁸⁵⁾

I just posted a comment on a Salon.com article by Mary Elizabeth “Kill ’Em All, Let God Sort ’Em Out” Williams. My comment should appear here, but my own testing of the link has not yielded positive results. If your results are equally bad, feel free to simply read my comment below. “Yet,” Williams writes, “a fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose…

My Mormon interlocutor, Linda, was not persuaded by my remarks. See her response on the discussion group’s page. My response to her response may be found on Yahoo! Groups and, in improved form, below. (My tracking of discussions outside this site, whether on Yahoo! or elsewhere, is occasional at best. I therefore urge persons wishing to discuss these remarks to comment here, or at least to note here that they’ve commented on…

I’ve made a new post to the evangelicals-Mormons discussion group. Find the original, complete with any typos I’ve corrected below (but without added links), here: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evangelicals_and_lds/message/3815. Sorry for the long delay in responding. Though the discussion has probably moved on without me, I thought I’d take a moment to respond anyway. Rather than try to address each point made by you [a Mormon group participant named Linda] and others who responded to…

J. I. Packer. Puritan Portraits: J. I. Packer on Selected Classic Pastors and Pastoral Classics . Ross-shire, Scotland, U.K.: Christian Focus Publications, 2012. Kindle (Mobi) Format. ISBN 978-1-78191-076-4. (Location numbers in the review are sometimes approximate.) For some years, an introduction by J. I. Packer has served among Protestant evangelicals a function roughly equivalent that of the nihil obstat among Roman Catholics. For a Protestant evangelical like myself to give a Packer…

John Crotts. Loving the Church: God's People Flourishing in God's Family. Wapwallopen, PA: Shepherd Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-9824387-4-9. No price on cover. In Loving the Church, John Crotts, a pastor-teacher (Faith Bible Church, Sharpsburg, GA), university and seminary graduate (Liberty University, The Master's Seminary), and association board member (Fellowship of Independent Reformed Evangelicals, FIRE), seeks to counter an epidemic, documented by pollster George Barna (26-7) and journalist Julia Duin (27-8), of Christians…

I continue to sign online petitions. While not so deluded as to believe signing these will have any influence on policy (all my representatives have strong ideological commitments, either in agreement with or opposed to my own, so that no change in their actions or rhetoric can realistically be expected), signing them does make me “feel better” for a time, and I hope gives some encouragement to those who have gone to…

On 01/06/2013, I posted the following question to a Yahoo discussion group for Mormon-Evangelical discussion. This group, by the way, is moderated by Christian apologist, Rob Bowman. Though I've not yet had the opportunity to read any of Rob's books (no book funds), I did take an online class from him at one point, and I've been favorably impressed with most of his answers (those that I've so far read) in this…

I just (Fri Jan 4, 2013, 11:47 pm) posted the message below to a Yahoo! discussion group hosted by apologist Rob Bowman, at this URL: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evangelicals_and_jws/message/40327. One thing I learned that will not be evident from the message below or the original post, is that a “curly” apostrophe, though it will be accepted if you paste it into the Yahoo! Groups editor and though it will display correctly in the online version of your post,…

Alas, I remain incapable of achieving extremest-of-the-extreme status. Compared to blogger Justin Edwards (a man likely more pious than myself), even my cherished pro-life convictions seem moderate. Edwards proposes a ban on abortion without even a self-defense (preserve the life of the mother) exception. In response to this proposal, I posted the comments below. (I've changed the URL in this version, since the original uses a customized domain that may no longer…

Like his typical remarks on foreign policy (remember those Republican primary debates?), Ron Paul's response to Wayne LaPierre shows what happens when praiseworthy ideals are wedded to a weak grasp of reality. Though common grace (God's pervasive positive influence on even those who will never become Christians) does seem (in combination with, or possibly expressed through, "traditional values" social conditioning) to guarantee that most people in most places most of the time…

Featured image inspired by Wikimedia Commons user Shubjt’s animated GIF, “Not equal to symbol in math and computer,” which see. U-T San Diego letter writers have continued trying, within the U-T word allowance for letters (125 words per the letter editor's email to me a while back, though the paper's posted guidelines only warn vaguely against being too “lengthy”), to debate whether “marriage” should be redefined to include homosexual unions. Leonard Foster's…

This was created as an op-ed for the U-T San Diego, my local paper, and posted here as a draft on the same day I emailed it to the U-T (that is, 08 December 2012, the day of the U-T article that prompted my remarks). It would not be made visible here until I either got some sort of response from the U-T or decided that a positive response was unlikely. One…