The third chapter of Crunchy Cons is on food. In it Dreher describes his move away from his old way of thinking, where food was simply “ballast, and nothing more” (p. 57). Even while he is describing how food became more and more important to him and his wife, he is able to disarm objections …
Our Cultural Tongue
If a pastor were to begin a series of messages on “the tongue,” more than a few of his listeners would start running a finger around the inside of their collars. They would do this before he had even said anything on the subject — we all know that gossip, and backbiting, and inane conversation …
Within A Generation
“More immediately, Europe will be semi-Islamic in its politico-cultural character within a generation. In the fourteenth century, the Black Death wiped out a third of the Continent’s population; in the twenty-first, a larger population will disappear — in effect, by choice. We are living through a rare moment: the self-extinction of the civilization which, for …
And Democracy is Us Listening to the Voices in our Head
“In other words, no one may rightly judge Demos except Demos. God, insofar as there is one, is synonymous with Community” (Bernard Iddings Bell, Crowd Culture, p. 103).
Teeming With Metaphor
“There are only two established sacraments in the Christian Church, which are baptism and the Lord’s Supper. But the whole world is sacramental, teeming with metaphor. To come to a fuller understanding of this, we should seek to grow in our knowledge of the two formal sacraments that have been placed within the Church. Baptism …
Cultural Backbone
Chesterton once commented that a man who does not believe something will fall for anything. The observation certainly holds for societies, and only a blind man could fail to miss that such a necessary gullibility is currently driving our culture. The gullibility is not created by various social pressures; rather, such pressures reveal the gullibility. …
Religious Authority in Israel
Under our discussion of the fifth commandment, we have been dealing with broader questions of authority, with an emphasis on “secular” authority. In this portion, we come to questions of religious authority, both legitimate and illegitimate. “The priests the Levites, and all the tribe of Levi, shall have no part nor inheritance with Israel . …
What Abraham Saw
Frank Turk has made a reasonable request in the comments section of the previous post. He has asked for 200 words on why I believe that Abraham believed the expansive promises, and whether this is in tension with Christ’s statement that Abraham rejoiced to see His day. So here it is, in brief compass. Remember …
A Mousetrap Gospel
I’ll explain the title shortly. Promise. The next chapter in By Faith Alone is by Rick Phillips, and in it he tackles two different challenges to the Reformed doctrine of imputation. The first is on the part of contemporary Arminians, who say that God accepts our faith in lieu of righteousness, and the second is …
Everything But His Reason
Chesterton once commented that a madman is not someone who has lost his reason; he is a man who has lost everything but his reason. Once there was a man who was driven by emotional forces, largely invisible to him. He was deeply insecure, and so he went from one fractured relationship to another. He …