“The difference between Osama bin Laden and Eric Rudolph is the difference between aberrant acts and aberrant teachings. Any human being with a belief system can do abominable things. But abominable acts are more likely to come in greater numbers and frequency when they are encouraged and perpetuated by religious texts and those who teach …
Porn As Revolution
“The revolutionaries simply put to their own use the libido that Versailles had unleashed. Sade, who more explicitly than any other in France described and reveled in the link between pornography and political revolution, was not an aberration of eighteenth-century French culture, but the culmination of the French predilection for pornography” (E. Michael Jones, Monsters …
Not Counting Rocks
“These passages describe required personal attributes and character — they are not a mechanical checklist. Paul and Peter require us to find a certain kind of man. This is important for many reasons, but early among them is that the elders are responsible to replenish their own ranks, and in order to find a certain …
No Unique Logres
I want to begin this next section of my review of Gelernter’s Americanism with a healthy reminder from C.S. Lewis. This comes from That Hideous Strength. “So that, meanwhile, is England,” said Mother Dimble. “Just this swaying to and fro between Logres and Britain?” “Yes,” said her husband. “Don’t you feel it? The very quality …
Facts Be Stubborn
Turns out that fewer than half of scientists who have published on climate change in the last few years believe that there is something to the global warming hooey. Looky here. Turns out that the icebergs may not be melting, and that the totali-science that some are trying to practice these days may be melting. …
Three Words
This psalm is categorized as one of the penitential psalms, but the heading lists it as a maskil, a teaching. In one of the other penitential psalms (51), David vows that as a result of his forgiveness, he will teach sinners the way (51:13). It is quite possible that this psalm is a fulfillment of …
Preaching Headlong
“The first is that the whole personality of the preacher must be involved. That is the point, of course, that was brought out in the well-known definition of preaching by Phillips Brookes, that it is ‘truth mediated through personality’. I believe that is right, that in preaching all one’s faculties should be engaged, the whole …
An Earlier 9-11
“Finally, they besieged Vienna again, only to be turned back by Poland’s King Jan III Sobieski and thirty thousand Polish hussars on a day that marks the high point of Muslim expansion in Europe: September 11, 1683” (Robert Spencer, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), p. 157).
Horror as Cultural Guilt
“The fact that the creator of the horror genre is celebrated as a proponent of sexual liberation indicates that our culture still does not understand horror. If our culture could make up its mind about sexual liberation, it would not need horror. It would either embrace sexual license wholeheartedly, as Mary’s husband did, or repudiate …
Candidates and Incumbents
“Put another way, the widespread neglect of elder qualifications certainly trivializes an office which the Bible says should be held in honor. But willingness to remove elders too quickly can have the same result. A young woman considering a suitor may legitimately decline his attentions for (comparatively) minor reasons. Those same reasons are not sufficient …