This editorial column ran in our local paper last night in response to a front page article that they ran some days before. That article described the release of a book by a local academic as a response to what I have written and said about slavery. So Why Isn’t the Record Straight? Here is …
Then You Qualify
We gather around this Table, week after week, month after month, and year and year. The mere fact that we do this means that we are defining the boundaries of our lives by it. At the same time, we are responsible to understand what is happening here, so that we do not drift into a …
No Doctrinal Grape Nuts
As many of you noted, the front page newspaper article last weekend made clear that some local unbelievers are very unhappy about the influence that our church is having in the community. We are grateful that we are having enough influence to be noticed, and we are equally grateful that our opponents have been judicially …
Art As Death Throes
“For the Enlightenment was to change the world. It is a period in which we today are still living, though at its end. Its aims have been fulfilled” (H.R. Rookmaaker, Modern Art and the Death of a Culture, p. 41).
No Frictionless World
“‘What would you do if everyone let you?’ is actually the same question as ‘what are you actually trying to accomplish?’ But such thought experiments are dangerouis because they require that we postulate a frictionless world, which is not the world we live in. Thus it is all too easy to drift off into utopian …
Murderous Myth or Gospel Unveiled
“The spirit born of the sacrificial murder inspires the community of its perpetrators to remember the murder as holy and creative. The Spirit of the Gospels, on the other hand, remembers the false accusations, sordid plots, the sham trials, and the weak faith of those who fled” (Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled, p. 130).
Not Just a Mirror
“Believing as I do that the arts in general are not merely a mirror reflecting social and cultural values, but are, on the contrary, powerful forces which shape and mould the way in which people live and behave (a view, incidentally, held by every major literary critic from Plato to T.S. Eliot), I have examined …
Why the Bait Hides the Hook
“One proverb expresses the principle well. He who takes the king’s coin becomes the king’s man. If we receive money from the government, we must know that the money comes with conditions. Today the conditions might be tolerable. In fact, they will certainly be tolerable because otherwise the bait would not hide the hook. But …
The Gospel Bars the Old Way Out
“Wherever and whenever the biblical tradition morally incapacitates a culture’s sacrificial system, the aggravating effects of mimetic desire flourish precisely because there is no reliable way to focus them on one flamboyant object of lust or loathing and eliminate them at his or her expense” (Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled, p. 110).
This and That, That and This
“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11) Growing Dominion, Part 101 “Better is a dry morsel, and quietness therewith, than an house full of sacrifices with strife” (Prov. 17:1). The book of Proverbs loves comparisons—this is better than that. And it loves combinations of comparisons—this with that is better than …