When I stand in defense of liberty, as I do, it is fairly easy for those on the Christian left to see and describe this as a concession to, or holdover from, certain Enlightenment ideals, owing more to Adam Smith than to the Pauline sentiment that where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is …
Listening to Rosanne Cash
Franke’s last chapter is called “The Many and the One.” It should be called “The Many, the One, and the Excluded.” He wants this whole thing to be a perichoretic dance, to be sure. But before we clasp hands in a mountain meadow, and sing a gentle chorus of inclusivity, we have to do something …
Warriors Not Thugs
“Marry, Sirs, if Merlin who was the Devil’s son was a true King’s man as ever ate bread, is it not a shame that you, being but the sons of bitches, must be rebels and regicides?” (That Hideous Strength). A fight, by its very nature, is not delicate. This is true in spiritual warfare, and …
In Love With This Present World
“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11) “Do your best to come to me soon. For Demas, in love with this present world, has deserted me and gone to Thessalonica. Crescens has gone to Galatia, Titus to Dalmatia. Luke alone is with me. Get Mark and bring him with you, …
Grace Upon Grace
All Christian living, including the part of Christian living that we call parenting, is supposed to be based on this reality — being before doing. The perennial temptation is to try to scrap our way into being by doing. That is the death trap that the Bible calls “works.” If the Holy Spirit of God …
This Kind of Thought Porridge
Franke begins the next chapter with, “The one truth is, and can only be, expressed in plurality” (p. 115). So that means the sentence bearing that claim, being one, isn’t really true. Of course if we added a sentence saying that truth is sometimes expressed without plurality, then it could have been true. But why …
And From the Department of Creepy . . .
When I first heard the wowza reviews of the eye candy show in Avatar (from what I hear, Pocahantas with Blueskins instead of Redskins), the first thing I thought of was a passage from Lewis who, about seventy years ago, saw all of this coming. How long would it take for bent men to turn …
The Future is the True East
We need to start thinking about church/state relations in eschatological categories. If we think of them in static categories, the Christian church will find it hard to avoid becoming reactionary. That kind of conservatism is the way of death. The Marxists know what they are supposed to be doing right now because they have an …
And It Was His Cologne Anyways
Don’t mind me. I am just trying to figure out how to hang pictures in my new digs. I think I did it. Wrong size for the wall though. The fact that I was in the sub service gives me the authority to say that this poster is less realistic than Red October.
The Prison Has Both a Right and Left Wing
Franke’s next chapter is on deconstruction, which to him is one of the operations of the Holy Ghost. The Other rescues the voices of those who have been “excluded, marginalized, and ignored” (p. 103) — examples might include the writers of the neo-Confederate newsletters that I mentioned previously. In this chapter, Franke says that deconstruction …