Consider all. Test All. Hold on to the good.

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Unapologetic

Francis Spufford (HarperOne: October 15, 2013), 240 pages.
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Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic is a wonderfully pugnacious defense of Christianity. Refuting critics such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the “new atheist” crowd, Spufford, a former atheist and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, argues that Christianity is recognizable, drawing on the deep and deeply ordinary vocabulary of human feeling, satisfying those who believe in it by offering a ruthlessly realistic account of the grown-up dignity of Christian experience. Fans of C. S. Lewis, N. T. Wright, Marilynne Robinson, Mary Karr, Diana Butler Bass, Rob Bell, and James Martin will appreciate Spufford’s crisp, lively, and abashedly defiant thesis. Unapologetic is a book for believers who are fed up with being patronized, for non-believers curious about how faith can possibly work in the twenty-first century, and for anyone who feels there is something indefinably wrong, literalistic, anti-imaginative and intolerant about the way the atheist case is now being made. ~ Product Description

John Meier on Jesus

A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus 1. The Roots of the Problem and the Person (New York: Doubleday, 1992)
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A tweedy poetaster who spent his time spinning out parables and Japanese koans, a literary aesthete who toyed with 1st-century deconstructionism, or a bland Jesus who simply told people to look at the lilies of the field — such a Jesus would threaten no one, just as the university professors who create him threaten no one.

Changing the Subject

Go The fallacies in this section change the subject by discussing the person making the argument instead of discussing reasons to believe or disbelieve the conclusion.
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Inductive Fallacies

Go Inductive reasoning consists of inferring from the properties of a sample to the properties of a population as a whole.
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Missing the Point

Go These fallacies have in common a general failure to prove that the conclusion is true.
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Fallacies of Ambiguity

Go The fallacies in this section are all cases where a word or phrase is used unclearly. There are two ways in which this can occur. (1) The word or phrase may be ambiguous, in which case it has more than one distinct meaning. (2) The word or phrase may be vague, in which case it has no distinct meaning.
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Category Errors

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These fallacies occur because the author mistakenly assumes that the whole is nothing more than the sum of its parts. However, things joined together may have different properties as a whole than any of them do separately.

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Non Sequitur

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The term non sequitur literally means “it does not follow”. In this section we describe fallacies which occur as a consequence of invalid arguments.-

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Syllogistic Errors

Go A categorical syllogism is an argument consisting of exactly three categorical propositions (two premises and a conclusion) in which there appear a total of exactly three categorical terms, each of which is used exactly twice.
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Fallacies of Definition

Go The purpose of a definition is to state exactly what a word means. A good definition should enable a reader to 'pick out' instances of the word or concept with no outside help.
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