I want Congress to authorize something I don’t believe they need to authorize, and which I reserve the right to do anyway whether or not they authorize it, in order that I might defend the credibility of a red line I didn’t actually draw, so that I may take decisive action that will not in …
Why Cigarette Smoking is Not a Sin for Others. Just a Sin for You.
Here is the general outline of a talk I gave on August 24, 2010 at Collegiate Reformed Fellowship. Reposting it again three years later for obvious reasons. My point this evening is not that smoking cigarettes is a sin everywhere and for everyone, under any conceivable circumstance. My thesis is a great deal simpler than …
High and Lowly
Not to worship, but to serve, Not to worship, but to save, Christ wrapped a towel around His waist, And as He knelt He gave A glorious affront To pious expectation here. Peter faltered at the grace, Peter faltered in dismay, Christ knelt to wash the grime and dirt As Peter tried to say His …
The Love Child of Baghdad Bob and Tokyo Rose
In The Ballad of the White Horse, Chesterton has a great line about the men who will come to threaten the West in the future, men who work “by detail of the sinning, and denial of the sin.” As Chesterton put it in another context, to be wrong, and to be carefully wrong, is the …
On Learning to Hate Their Dog
I want to thank you all for your kind invitation to address a recent dust-up in the blogosphere. It is not often that I get to discuss things like this. Thabiti wrote a good article here, which elicited boatloads of comments, and so he followed it up with more here. Jonathan Merritt thought that the …
Book of the Month/September
So this is a book that I really did not expect to be reviewing as my book of the month selection, but life is funny. Mind & Cosmos is subtitled “Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.” When a book with this kind of subtitle comes out, written by a philosopher …
A Wireless Kingdom
In conversation with a friend this morning, a thought came to mind that I thought I would pass on. We were talking about the world in which things like twerking and Miley Cyrus can happen — the realm of pop culture and all the bubbles floating around it. And every bubble that floats by right …
Really Chintzy
“One of the most pernicious forms of Sabbath-breaking is this: ‘Once every seven days God expects us to get chintzy for Him'” (For a Glory and a Covering, p 130).
Syrian Just War, or Just War in Syria?
The Syria thing is such a mess that it appears to fit right in. And so let me say just a few things that might indicate why I might say something like that, and to help everyone feel right at home. It is the Middle East, after all. Traditional just war theory contains two fundamental …
The Church in The Pilgrim’s Progress
For a few years now one of my side hobbies has been that of defending and/or explaining The Pilgrim’s Progress. For various reasons, modern Christians have taken it into their heads to feel very superior to it, I can’t really explain why. Our generation has a very cordial dislike of allegory, but the medievals were …