This morning, Tony La Russa’s daughter is likely reeling from her unfortunate choice of tweet language. Her efforts to explain away her intentions is perhaps as unsettling as the tweet itself.
As I was hopelessly stuck in pre-Game 5 traffic trying to get home yesterday, I queued up again a conversation between Ken Myers, editor of the Mars Hill audio journal, and Alan Jacobs, a professor or literature at Wheaton, and author of the 2008 book, Original Sin: A Cultural History. The hour long conversation does plenty to whet your whistle for his accessible and pleasurable read about an otherwise foul subject. I heartily commend the $5 mp3 download.
While Jacobs’ book isn’t an explicit defense of the doctrine of original sin (as we sought to make from the perspective of the Westminster Assembly last Sunday), it nevertheless deftly wades through the morass of competing explanations of human nature that history and recent anthropology have sought to offer, and discovers that alternative theories only leave us with the same question: why does evil persist in us? Continue reading