Theology That Bites Back
The main category for book reviews and cultural interaction.
Introduction: How do you know when you are being steered? I mean steered by the shapers and molders of the bleeding edge contempo-evangelical conscience, which would be, of course, the devil. The Basic Move: You know that you are being steered when positions that were demanded of you x number of years ago are now …
I have seen Jon Gabriel’s tweet many times, and unfortunately this is because there have been numerous occasions in the last few years where the snark fits like a glove. “My favorite part about the Obama era is all the racial healing.” I am old enough to remember 1967, and I am starting to feel …
“Think of the countless human acts, acts of copulation, spread over millennia, that led to the birth of Plato, Attila, or Napoleon. Yet it is on these unpredictables that human history largely depends” (C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, p. 39). We look around ourselves and we think we see solid things. We look at them …
“Any historical event, once it occurs, however unlikely, can be shown to have been inevitable by any competent historian. But reading the clues before it all happens is a different matter. And so we declare, with certainty, the inevitability of the highly improbable” (Rules, 264).
“The world is not something that produces information. Information is something that produces the world (Rules, pp. 263-264).
Introduction: Taken at face value, the phrase black lives matter is a phrase that no sensible person could differ with. Of course they do. Also taken at face value, the rejoinder all lives matter is equally true. Of course they do. The reason for the back and forth, then, has nothing to do with the …
“True patronage will often be dismissed as philistinism by those who didn’t make the cut” (Rules, p. 258).
“I would argue that more patrons are willing to be patrons than artists are willing to be artists. Responsible patrons are put off by the bohemian posturing. If they are not put off by it, then they are funding the decadence of intellectual rot. If they run across a little lord byron in skinny jeans, …
“How many of us have had the experience of staring at a movie screen, thinking that thing up there the ‘dumbest thing I ever saw,’ while at the same time reeling under the weight of the knowledge that the dumbest thing you ever saw cost 75 million to make? And somebody — let us call …
