I will begin with an explanation, and then move on to the big announcement. If you want, you can jump down to the end and get the big announcement first. You may, ladies and gentlemen, suit yourselves.
We believe that many of you who follow our ministry here know that we face two basic challenges. The first is the challenge that is always faced by anyone who wants to argue for something that is “off the beaten path.” Because you have followed us for a while, I need scarcely remind you that “off the beaten path” is not synonymous with “off the wall.” Throughout scriptural history, whenever prophets would come in from the wilderness to confront princes in their palaces, the route they took into the city was always off the beaten path. That is why it was called a wilderness. They lived off the beaten path. And the reason they even bothered to come to the palace in the first place was to confront all the courtiers and advisors, not to mention their “best practices.”
So that is one challenge. Whenever you want someone to turn away from anything they have long accepted, you need to marshal your arguments, lay out the texts of Scripture, and thereby plainly display the fact that Jesus did not die and rise in order to strip the public square of all references to the transcendent.
But there is another challenge as well. Our principle adversary in all our battles is various forms of dualism, or the myth of neutrality in one guise or another, and this second challenge is related to the fact that the secularists have become hypocritical liars. For many decades, they preened themselves on their commitment to free speech, and yet, once the arguments for the opposition seemed to be getting any kind of traction, their commitment to free speech vanished, like the dew off a melon in August.
So our second challenge has been that of getting access to the microphone. For example, many of you have seen Season 1 of Man Rampant, the delivery platform for that show being Amazon Prime. We have been continuing to record episodes, but one of the early ones in Season 2 was an interview with Peter Hitchens on the COVID hysteria, which was duly censored by our masters and betters at Amazon. They won’t let you hear the arguments. Arguments? We don’t need no stinking arguments.
A number of you have also seen our series called Reformed Basics. Amazon has let most of them through, which was of course awfully sweet, but we got a very cryptic message from them that the one on Sola Fide was not up to their production standards, and that this decision could not be appealed. Of course, the production standards were identical to all the others that they did let through . . . and so, naturally enough, suspicion has fallen on Scott Clark, in that he could have been the one who reported our lax production standards. Possible, right? After all, he has most to lose if it turns out that we do teach sola fide. These are troubled times indeed, and anything is possible.
This embargo-all-the-dangerous-thoughts approach is common in both the secular and Christian worlds. Among the certified evangelicals, we are the ones “who must not be named.” And so, for example, we have had multiple instances of people who agreed to speak for us in some venue or other getting pressure from the Respectable not to do it, and sometimes a significant amount of pressure. We have had numerous cancellations, withdrawn invitations, and a hardy handful of people who ignored the ungodly pressure. You might be surprised to find out how many evangelical organizations outsource approval of their possible associations to Internet trolls. What all this boils down to (again) is the obvious strategy of keeping us away from the microphone.
So what we did is we bought our own microphone.
All of this, remember, is building up to a big announcement. What might that announcement be?
Canon Press — outfitters of the Reformation — have been working on a way where we can deliver content to you without have to pass through numerous checkpoints, and having to show our papers to the surly guards. And so here it is.
Announcing the Canon App. It has been approved by Apple, and is now available in the App Store. It is also available in the GooglePlay store. The app will be available on iPhone, Android, and AppleTV. At some time in the near future, it will appear on FireTV, AndroidTV, and Roku.
And this is what it will get you. You basically get access to all of Canon’s digital content, period. Films, video clips, audio books, Man Rampant, and so on. All our audio and video content.
Although this is a subscription service, here is the No Quarter November giveaway part. You can go there now, and sign up, and get a one month trial of the app, completely free of charge. For example, audio recordings of the early chapters of Ecochondriacs are already there. In addition, for those who don’t want to pay the subscription fee, a bunch of content will be housed there for free.
Ready, set go.