“All distinctly American music originates from poor people in the South” (Gene Edward Veith, Honky-Tonk Gospel, p. 9).
A Mother/Daughter Inversion
“The invention of science is not the reason that there are no longer witch-hunts, but the fact that there are no longer witch-hunts is the reason that science has been invented. The scientific spirit, like the spirit of enterprise in an economy, is a by-product of the profound action of the Gospel text” (Girard, The …
Some Small Fragments
My father met my mother in the course of the Korean War. He was a naval officer (USNA, class of 50), serving on a destroyer out of Japan, and she was a Canadian missionary in Japan. How they got together is a great story that I should tell sometime. I mention it now simply to …
Nothing But High Confusion
Westphal’s book is a collection of related essays, the first one having the same title as the book — Overcoming Onto-theology. That essay is promising, but unhappily it promises all the wrong things, and then does a good job in fulfilling the promises. I have three basic criticisms of his project as set forth here, …
Our Minds Are Not Shoeboxes
“We tend to think of our students’ minds as finite shoeboxes, and we then think we must take special care not to put anything in there if we do not want it to remain there for life. But the brain is more like a muscle. A student who learns one language, such as Latin, is …
In Brief, Whose Side Are You On?
“Are Christians defenseless against unbelievers who claim the Bible is X-rated and compare it to pornography? May it never be! Having laid down a rationale for the depiction of depravity, let us now qualify that rationale with context, context, context. And context makes all the difference between moral exhortation and immoral exploitation of sin” (Brian …
Lynch Mobs Used to be Invisible
“The failure of mythological genesis, in the case of the martyrs, makes it possible for historians to understand in a rational light for the first time and on a large scale the representations of persecution and their corresponding acts of violence. We come upon the crowds in the course of their mythopoetic activity, and it …
Receiving At the Table
In the old covenant, the sacrifices were a type of the coming sacrifice of the Messiah, our Lord Jesus. A pure animal was selected, set apart, killed and offered up to God on an altar. In this the priest was enacting a type, a foreshadowing, of the coming propitiation accomplished by Christ when He was …
Complaints and Complaining
We cannot have a body of saints this size in this world without having that body contain a significant number of complaints. Every complaint has two components. The first is the objective aspect, the offense, or irritation, or annoyance. Sometimes this problem is not truly objective – it is possible to believe someone has sinned …
Just Microwave It
“The reason mental discipline is difficult is that we live in a fallen world, and God has cursed the ground so that thorns and thistles grow there. Laziness and sin both make people want to coast downhill. Chesterton once said that Satan fell by the force of gravity. We like to relax our Latin standards …