Theology That Bites Back
The main category for book reviews and cultural interaction.
Introduction: Today marks the eighteenth anniversary of the 911 attacks, and it is not quite accurate to say that everything has changed. It would be more to the point to say that everything is still changing. One of the basic things still in flux is that Americans are yet trying to find a fixed center …
“We must distinguish, in other words, because dissent and deviance. Dissent is like civil disobedience. It occurs when people are willing in principles to play by the rules but have a genuine, good-faith objection to the specific content of the prevailing set of rules. They disobey despite the consequences that these actions may incur. Deviance, on the other hand, occurs when people disobey the rules for self-interested reasons”
Nation of Rebels, pp. 79-80
“Once we have accepted the duty of administering parental discipline, we discover that discipline itself falls into two categories: corrective and formative. Corrective discipline is correction of manifested sins in the past, as well as correction with regard to the future. Formative discipline anticipates temptations that are common to man and seeks to instill certain character traits beforehand”
Letter to the Editor: This message is intended to respond to your recent blog: "David French and the Chimerical Flibbertigibbet." I understand the main thrust of your argument in this ...
“They were romantic individualists who valued self-reliance and were possessed of a grand contempt for mass society. As Thoreau, who is best known for spending two years ‘roughing it’ in a cabin on Walden Pond (his mother actually brought him regular meals and did his washing), famously wrote, ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.’”
Nation of Rebels, p. 69
“Ineffective discipline is a way of disowning, rejecting, or hating your children. God does not do that with us, and we must not do that with our children”
Introduction: The United States has a written Constitution, as in, written down, which has been a wonderful firewall and blessing. But America also has, as all nations do, an unwritten constitution. ...
“The idea of a counterculture is ultimately based on a mistake. At best, countercultural rebellion: a set of dramatic gestures that are devoid of any progressive political or economic consequences and that detract from the urgent task of building a more just society. In other words, it is rebellion that provides entertainment for the rebels, and nothing much else”
Nation of Rebels, p. 65
“If someone loses his temper, and you clean up after him, regardless of whether he is a two-year-old, a thirty-year-old, or a sixty-year-old, you are going to have to do it again . . . You get more of what you subsidize and less of what you penalize.”
