“This is far enough for you to go in judging your brother: ‘Were I in his condition, should I do as he does, I should go against my light. I should act against my conscience.’ But therefore to conclude that he goes against his light, and acts dishonorably, is very sinful. Many carnal men think …
Getting Ready
Steyn comments on “the belated realization among Europeans that they’re elderly and fading and that their Muslim populations are young and surging, and in all these clashes the latter are putting down markers for the way things will be the day after tomorrow” (Mark Steyn, America Alone, p. 5).
Not Much Changes
“In its impact on people’s behavior and sense of ‘alienation’ and by its apparent sincerity of feeling, The Stranger came close to becoming the mid-twentieth century equivalent of Goethe’s best-selling The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), which provoked hundreds of suicides all over Europe” (Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge, p. 161).
And You Have to Sign the Card With a Little Stubby Pencil Too
“We do not like the idea of requiring a man to be baptized down in front of the church before we call him a professing Christian — although Jesus commanded such baptism. In lieu of this, we offer a substitute of our devising. Instead of being baptized in front of the church, we say he …
Two Coal Fires/Easter 2007
Introduction: The presence of the Lord Jesus, alive just as He promised He would be, transforms everything. We can see this very clearly in the fall and restoration of the apostle Peter after the resurrection. The Text: “And the servants and officers stood there, who had made a fire of coals; for it was cold: …
Yuppie Belt-Tightening
The third chapter of Crunchy Cons is on food. In it Dreher describes his move away from his old way of thinking, where food was simply “ballast, and nothing more” (p. 57). Even while he is describing how food became more and more important to him and his wife, he is able to disarm objections …
Our Cultural Tongue
If a pastor were to begin a series of messages on “the tongue,” more than a few of his listeners would start running a finger around the inside of their collars. They would do this before he had even said anything on the subject — we all know that gossip, and backbiting, and inane conversation …
Within A Generation
“More immediately, Europe will be semi-Islamic in its politico-cultural character within a generation. In the fourteenth century, the Black Death wiped out a third of the Continent’s population; in the twenty-first, a larger population will disappear — in effect, by choice. We are living through a rare moment: the self-extinction of the civilization which, for …
And Democracy is Us Listening to the Voices in our Head
“In other words, no one may rightly judge Demos except Demos. God, insofar as there is one, is synonymous with Community” (Bernard Iddings Bell, Crowd Culture, p. 103).
Teeming With Metaphor
“There are only two established sacraments in the Christian Church, which are baptism and the Lord’s Supper. But the whole world is sacramental, teeming with metaphor. To come to a fuller understanding of this, we should seek to grow in our knowledge of the two formal sacraments that have been placed within the Church. Baptism …