“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 …
When Being Above It All Is Actually Under A Pile
“Statements like, ‘The sex and violence don’t bother me’ are not necessarily expressions of maturity. If a movie is exploitative with vice, it ought to bother the viewer, and if it doesn’t, then that viewer is being deadened in his or her spirituality and humanity” (Brian Godawa, Hollywood Worldviews, pp. 178).
St. Peter Stumbles
“Like all deserters, Peter demonstrates the sincerity of his conversion by blaming his old friends” (Girard, The Scapegoat, p. 156).
Overcoming the Onto-Polis
Peter Leithart has pointed out the need for another Christendom. I agree with him completely. This is over against the modernity project, which wants to manage everything on secularist assumptions — in science, law, art, politics, academia, custom, and so on. With regard to human society, the structures of modernity run all the way up, …
A Hermeneutic of Hot and Sticky Things
I want to play for a moment with a distinction that Merold Westphal makes, but without saying anything one way or another about what Westphal is doing with it. If a metanarrative is a philosophically-derived account of Enlightenment hubris that is calculated to justify that hubris, then that would be bad. With that stipulated definition, …