N.D. Wilson
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Death By Living
$19.99Add to cartA poetic portrait of faith, futility, and the joy of this mortal life.In this astoundingly unique book, bestselling author N.D. Wilson reminds each of us that to truly live we must recognize that we are dying. Every second we create more of our past-more decisions, more breathing, more love and more loathing, all of it slides by into the gone as we race to grab at more moments, at more memories made and already fading.
We are all authors, creators of our own pasts, of the books that will be our lives. We stare at the future or obsess about the present, but only the past has been set in stone, and we are the ones setting it. When we race across the wet concrete of time without purpose, without goals, without laughter and love and sacrifice, then we fail in our mortal moment. We race toward our inevitable ends without artistry and without beauty.
All of us must pause and breathe. See the past, see your life as the fruit of providence and thousands of personal narratives. What led to you? You did not choose where to set your feet in time. You choose where to set them next.
Then, we must see the future, not just to stare into the fog of distant years but to see the crystal choices as they race toward us in this sharp foreground we call the present. We stand in the now.
God says create. Live. Choose. Shape the past. Etch your life in stone, and what you make will be forever.
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Notes From The Tilt A Whirl
$15.99Add to cartWhat is this World? What kind of place is it?
“The round kind. The spinning kind. The moist kind. The inhabited kind. The kind with flamingos (real and artificial). The kind where water in the sky turns into beautifully symmetrical crystal flakes sculpted by artists unable to stop themselves (in both design and quantity). The kind of place with tiny, powerfully jawed mites assigned to the carpets to eat my dead skin as it flakes off . . . The kind with people who kill and people who love and people who do both . . .
This world is beautiful but badly broken.
“I love it as it is, because it is a story, and it isn’t stuck in one place. It is full of conflict and darkness like every good story, a world of surprises and questions to explore. And there’s someone behind it; there are uncomfortable answers to the hows and whys and whats. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Through Him were all things made . . .
Welcome to His poem. His play. His novel. Let the pages flick your thumbs.”
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Rhetoric Companion : A Student’s Guide To Power In Persuasion
$24.00Add to cartThis textbook is designed for students of classical rhetoric who are old enough to drive, and young enough to still be breathing. It is offered in the conviction that God in His common grace bestowed a great deal of practical wisdom about public discourse on the ancient practitioners of rhetoric, and that we must hold what they taught up against the final standard of Scripture.
Definitions of rhetoric vary in the classical writers, but adapting one of them, with a peculiarly Christian backdrop and understanding, provides us with our working definition of rhetoric: “the art of a good man speaking well.” And in this “art,” you want three things to line up. You want convergence of ethos, pathos, and logos.
Logos: Logic is the foundation for logos. Logic deals with statements and their relationships with one another. For diligent speakers, and especially for those diligent students who are not all that confident, the inclination is to put all your eggs in the basket of content preparation. Logos is a great place to begin, but ethos and pathos are just as important.
Ethos: Give yourself to the cultivation of your character, but beware of the dangers of affectation. The problems attendant to this will be avoided if your first concern is that of worship, study, helping, giving, and so forth. If someone goes off to a good liberal arts college and comes back home with a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows, a pipe, and faux accent, and is twice as much of a snot as when he left home, the problem is ethos. Remember, a person cannot be a good speaker without being a good person, and this means that in the Christian worldview, ethos is holiness.
Pathos: We do not play with words, we work with them. And because we live in a fallen world, we fight dragons with them. Believe what you say, and say what you believe. And if you do not feel it at any level, this means you do not really believe it. This means there should be a correspondence between the content of what you are saying and how you are affected by it. If you shed false tears, then you are a manipulative, deceitful, treacherous hazard to the republic. Do not try to affect a group of hearers by anything that does not affect you first.As a stand-alone text, this book can be used over the course of a term or semester. As a supplement or companion, it can be used in conjunction with some of the historic texts for the study of classic rhetoric, extended over the course of a year. Besides ethos, pathos, an
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Notes From The Tilt A Whirl
$18.99Add to cartA visual, poetic exploration of the narrative nature of the world and the personality of the Poet behind it all. When Nate Wilson looks at the world around him, he asks “What is this place? Why is this place? Who approved it? Am I supposed to take it seriously?” What could such an outlandish, fantastical world say about its Creator? In these sparkling chapters, Wilson gives an aesthetic examination of the ways in which humanity has tried to make sense of this overwhelming carnival ride of a world. He takes a whimsical, thought-provoking look at everything from the “magic” of quantum physics, to nature’s absurdities, to the problem of evil, evolution and hell. These frequently humorous, and uniquely beautiful portraits express reality unknown to many Christians-the reality of God’s story unfolding around and among us. As the author says, “Welcome to His poem. His play. His novel. His comedy. Let the pages flick your thumbs.”