The local church is where most Christians come into contact with the government of the church, and, not surprisingly, there is considerable debate about the government of the local church. The purpose here is to sketch some the various positions that have been taken, and give a few scriptural indications of what I believe to …
Beyond Everything You Ever Thought
Once there was a young girl who worried about everything, but her biggest worry was whether or not she was a real Christian. If she thought for a moment that she loved God, the next moment it occurred to her than she didn’t love him enough. If she felt sincere in her faith, the obvious …
East-Bound, West-Bound, Hide-Bound
In this post, I want to concentrate, not on the need for doctrinal integrity in the abstract, but on the need for men of doctrinal integrity in the leadership of the Church. Doctrinal integrity is not a self-enforcing ideal. Men must hold to the standards of the church, understand them, love them, and defend them. …
Blogging About Blago
One of the things that makes me happy about the Blagojevich uproar is the eloquent testimony it provides for the thesis that people don’t ever stop doing what people do. And because many of them have not ever read a book, they don’t know that this is what they are doing. The world of Chicago …
Why There’s 57 Channels and Nothing On
“Only in this century did the techniques of recording, film, television, and video make art, music, and literature in all their forms—from the highest and most cultivated to the lowest and crudest—accessible to virtually every member of society, even teenagers and young children . . . This vastly increased availability of every form of art …
Either Way, Not Yet Viral
This is an odd one on a number of levels. The central oddity is why this isn’t found in all the regular news outlets and blogs. If you google “Supreme Court,” “Souter,” and “Obama’s birth certificate,” you will find the information in a bunch of cyber-backwater places. I haven’t found this discussed in any of …
Our Secularist Mammon-Monkeys
The Persian Empire was what it was, but it still mattered whether Hamaan had the emperor’s ear or Esther did. In that case, Hamaan was bad for the Jews, and in ours Obama is bad for the unborn. On that front, we are still in a plot line waiting for the eucatastrophe. But for those …
Wordsmithing Over at Nate’s Blog
Nate continues to write about learning how to write. Good stuff here.
The Chicken That Didn’t Get Scrawny
As Christians discuss the morality of their food choices, one of the most compelling arguments for opting out of the chicken-sandwich-at-Arbys lifestyle is that brought by those who maintain that large-scale factory farming is necessarily abusive to the animals involved. I want to write more about this later on, but wanted to state two guiding …
If You Know What a Head Shot Is . . .
I just finished a book that was more informative than good. The author had some really decent observations and concerns, but that was not the really illuminating part. The illuminating part was his simple reporting. The book was called Fame Junkies, and I heard the author, Jake Halpern, being interviewed on Ken Myers’ Mars Hill …