Mike Wittmer

What I think. What I know. What I think I know.

  • Paul Beals

    Yesterday I received the sad news that my missions professor from my time in seminary, Paul Beals, had passed into the presence of our Lord. He leaves behind his adoring wife, Vivian. I don’t know what word to use here, for “adoring” or “devoted” are far too weak to describe their marriage. You will be hard pressed…

  • what you win them with you may lose them with

    My friend Eric Strattan sent me this link. It is long, but it deftly explores the progression of contemporary Christian music and its effect on discipleship and the church. The money quote comes in the last paragraph: “Despite all the affected teenage rebellion, I continued to call myself a Christian into my early twenties. When I…

  • ain’t that the truth

    I just read this article that perfectly describes my experience with a rising minority of student papers. Have you ever read something that made you say, “How did she eavesdrop on our conversation?” I have had these exact dialogues with students, and it seems that I’m having a few more of them each year. I would…

  • God still reigns

    I was driving home from Indy yesterday afternoon, the unlikely site of LeBron’s imminent Waterloo, and I found the game on ESPN radio. I was fairly pleased when the Pacers jumped out to a 9-0 lead, and according to the announcers, the Heat were coming apart. Wade looked sour and LeBron was shouting at Mario Chalmers,…

  • a good word

    I just read this wonderfully written essay by Ed Dobson on Christianity Today online. I admire his honesty and biblical perspective on his disease. This is spot on. May God give Ed many more years, and may he indeed grow old with Lorna.

  • one true sentence

    Writers will appreciate this quote from Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast: “I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was starting a new story and…

  • dying for the Word of the Lord

    I have refrained from using this blog to plug my new book, The Last Enemy, but I mention it now because it’s an important counterpoint to another new book on death. It’s simply called Death, and it’s written by Shelly Kagan, a Yale philosopher, and published by Yale University Press. Kagan excerpts his book in…

  • it gets better?

    So many people have commented so well on the gay marriage uproar last week that I don’t have much to add, but I wanted to say two things. 1. Questioning motives is often a smokescreen. Last week the left repeatedly said that conservatives are against gay marriage because we’re angry and afraid of what gay…

  • the bottom of the blooper barrel

    I hope enough time has passed for me to include this blooper. When my university decided to issue laptops to every student, it explained its rationale in the Cornerstone magazine. The article said that a laptop computer “is a tool that has become so commonplace here at the end of the Twentieth Century, with the…

  • wait, there’s more!

    The paper which first gave me the idea to accumulate bloopers was written by a student who went on to earn his Ph.D. and is now on the receiving end of such fun. His paper was on Anselm’s ontological argument for God’s existence, which states that the greatest possible being must exist, otherwise he wouldn’t…