Our Father and God, You have established Your Church as a royal priesthood in this world, and so we intercede for the nations of men now, confessing on their behalf so that the grace of Your forgiveness will soon be extended to them all. Father God, we confess that You have ordered the boundaries and …
The Moral Necessity of Some Form of Conservatism
Now in working through this issue it is crucial that we not affirm the consequent. All cows have four legs, but having four legs doesn’t make it a cow. I would also want to insist that all lawful sexual behavior must be heterosexual, but that doesn’t make all heterosexual behavior lawful. There is a moral …
Uber-Post of All Time
As I have been playing around with this new website, fooling about with techie analyses and such, I am reminded of an experience I had once in the Navy. I was on the USS Tusk, a vintage diesel submarine, and we were headed over to the Med. We were making that transit on the surface …
Same Graveyard
“Solomon knows that the position of the wise man is better, but he cannot say why. All the data under the sun that he can find shows that the wise and the foolish wind up in the same graveyard. So Solomon expresses his preference for wisdom, a preference suspended, in good Kantian fashion, in mid-air. …
And What God Turns Upside Down Stays Upside Down
These are strange economic times, and nothing is stranger than the fact that many appear to think it is normal. So, what are Christians to do? How we arrange our affairs? What do we invest in? There are two principal points to make here. The first concerns what we are not to invest in. Do …
Okay, Bad Example
Just a quick note on another important aspect of the food debate, one that doesn’t relate to the food itself directly. At the same time, it does reflect on the nature of the debate about food. I speak of the issue of “food corporations,” “making money,” “product disparagement,” and “coercive competition.” It is difficult to …
Rattle Our Bones Loose
“Solomon’s taste was refined — he obtained talented musicians. Our tastes are not as refined — we obtain car stereo systems which can rattle our bones loose with a thumping bass. But in either case, meaning and purpose are not an acoustical matter. Someone with refined sensibilities may sniff at the mindlessness of pop music, …
Imagination Fail
Over at Credenda, my friend Pastor Toby has a great critical review of a recent book by Walter Brueggemann. This is a must read — the review, I mean. Not the book.
All a Bunch of Nothing
“Think for a moment of what Solomon was in a position to do. We should mediate briefly on what he probably did. He had a thousand women, all of them built from the ground up, and all good looking. He had more money than a man can spend. He had vast estates. He had time …
There Wasn’t Any Food, He Explained
Chapter 3 is a short piece on “The Elevator.” Pollan doesn’t have a lot to say here, except to point out what a large amount of corn there is out there, and to state it in such a way as to make us a bit disgusted with certain aspects of handling that much. For example, …