As we come to God to worship Him, our constant prayer should be that He makes us unable to stand before His holy presence. When this happens, there is always a winnowing effect in the church. One of the names historians give to such winnowings is reformation. Men love religion when that religion enables them …
A Fourth Decade of Psalms/Psalm 33
Introduction: God is greatly to be praised. He is worthy of all honor and praise. Our ability to praise Him falls short of necessity, and yet we are still summoned to it. Unlike the failures of sin, there is a glorious failure in praising God. Who can even begin to do it justice? The Text: …
The Central Problem With Pragmatism
“We do not want to live in accordance with the dictates of pragmatism, which can be hung with its own rope. Pragmatism doesn’t work. At the same time, commitment to something more important than immediate success often as the side benefit of immediate success” (The Case for Classical Christian Education, p. 142).
And There Are Reasons For It
“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 …