W. Littlejohn > Recent Status Updates

Brilliant stuff. Wonderfully written. Look out for blog posts...

Brilliantly-written and thoroughly intriguing. I'm enjoying every minute of it.

People are accustomed to complain carelessly about the "radical leftist agenda" in our country. Ha! This is the genuine article. Equal parts illuminating, aggravating, and amusing.

Reading through the series with my wife for the second time (first time started while we were engaged)

An appalling article by Schneider a few years back deterred me from even giving this book the time of day, so to speak. But for an essay I'm hoping to publish, I decided I needed to read it. Will be blogging through it at www.swordandploughshare.com.

Seemed promising, but turned out to be very tedious. The author is not a terribly adept writer, and Hooker's life--let's face it--doesn't quite have the excitement of a Martin Luther. It needs a really great narrator to bring it to life. The worst part is that we really know very little about Hooker's life, and instead of simply leaving these gaps, Secor seeks to fill them by imaginative speculation. Not cool.

Started chipping away at this again while I was on vacation. Such important and good things to say, but so annoyingly said! It'll take me awhile to finish ploughing through this.

The reading group I was in imploded eventually. Most people seemed to have no patience for Taylor and his fantastically broad-brush imaginative reconstructions. For my part, I think they were being a bit too harsh, and hopefully the group will start up again...otherwise, I might have to finish it on my own.

Oops, forgot to update this. Got to the end of the Elizabethan period, which is what I'm really interested in, a couple months ago. I'll go back and read the rest eventually, but it'll be a while.

Solid so far, although parts are a bit tedious to someone who has grown up in the milieu of Puritan theology and knows its ins and outs, since he feels the need to give the reader a thorough induction into the contours of Puritan theology.

almost finished...Skinner clearly feels more at home amid the resistance theorists than he does in the earlier material, and his account accordingly becomes much more interesting, perpective, and compelling.

still working through this immensely dense, fascinating, and patient book. Dramatic and significant insights on almost every page. This will be the fuel for a lot of writing for months to come, I think.

Just started this as a read-aloud with Nat and Rachel, and it looks already like it's going to be an awesome adventure.

thus far, it's been a bit too rant-like. I mean, I like purple prose as much as anyone, but it should be used selectively, not for seventy pages straight. Nonetheless, a compelling case so far, and occasionally the level of rhetoric is well-justified. Read more here: http://www.swordandploughshare.com/ma...

That a book with this many flaws could still be considered, 31 years later, the definitive work in this subject area, is probably a sign of just how desperately in need of thorough, balanced scholarship this subject area is. Not, of course, that this isn't still a brilliant accomplishment, just frequently flawed and sometimes quite confused (at least, to my understanding).

Just finished the immense and thorough introduction, which didn't give a very flattering portrait of this Protestant political propagandist. I never knew that the Scottish Reformation was a time of such political chaos and intrigue...I mean, I sorta knew, but not the full extent. I will have to go read a proper history now.

Re-reading through the Reformation era texts for dissertation research. Each time I read this, I'm more impressed by the care of the selections, the translations, and the introductions. The texts themselves get more and more illuminating too. One consistent theme: these people were very comfortable with violence and war in a way that would shock most modern Christian ethicists. They inhabit the OT, not the NT.

Thus far he has, with painstaking philosophical precision, just been laying the groundwork for the very interesting discussion that promises to follow. Therefore, it has been rather boring thus far...but it is clear enough already that the issue of private property is about 100 times more complicated than you would think from those silly assertions that our political ideologues spout off all the time.

Such delightful naivete...back when the Enlightenment was still in its ruddy youth, these guys could be so careless and confident in their assertions, before we all found out what a sham it was.

One of the most thoroughly-footnoted volumes I've ever seen, and unfortunately, I find myself inexorably distracted by each footnote...so very slow going. A feast on every page, though.

Really smart, really self-deceived man...

For something that is so often so speculative, this is a remarkably compelling book.

Well-written and intriguing as this book is, it doesn't actually have all that much to do with Scriptural hermeneutics...and where it does, I'm not convinced that Nevin's thought is terribly relevant to modern hermeneutical debates.