One of our seminary students has become a friend, Chris Ridgeway. I gave him a new four-set series from IVP by Don Everts and he’s reviewing them for us.
Everts, Don. All The Ideas Living in My Head: One Guy?s Musings About Truth. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007.

Don Everts has lot of little people living in his head. This might seem less unusual when we realize Everts hails from Boulder, Colorado ? the anything-goes-organic-incense capital of the great Rockies. The author of Jesus With Dirty Feet is also a regional campus missionary with InterVarsity and maybe was thinking of his college audience when writing a new series of pomo-length booklets on what amounts to epistemology ? complete with tiny voices.
His introductory title All The Ideas gives us a cocktail party tour of the characters that inhabit Evert?s thoughts: Shiny Happy Globalization (strutting and hopeful), Authority of Scripture (old man clutching a leather bible weapon), and Girls Can Be Pretty Darn Interesting (some seem self-explanatory). With Don Miller-like innocence, Everts ?aw shucks? his way through a set of sometimes parallel, sometimes perpendicular ideas, all with names, accents, and varying intensity of opinion.
But he?s not interested in individual ideas as much as telling us how they interact. Everts is offering what he calls a ?third pallete of words and metaphors to choose from? when it comes to comes to thinking. The first two? Modern and postmodern. The former is caricatured as mathematical bun-heads, the later as goteed experience junkies. I?m a ?man without a camp? he asserts ? and under these stereotypical descriptions, it?s no wonder.
There is something helpful to Evert?s framework that reminds us of how thoughts affect us. Permanent Resident Thoughts have gained seniority and deserve to be weighed over new thoughts (even if they?re Sexy Thoughts). Sugar Ideas stroke you by making themselves pleasurable to believe. But Everts third way is simplistic, and perhaps covers his insecurity to judge by shoving things into the passive voice. Other ?popular religious ideas? just ?keep getting kicked out? or ?look silly,? he explains. Hmm. Maybe the rest of his series will find more specifics, but as of now it?s about as substantive as that incense.
~ Chris Ridgeway