He who defines, wins. He who successfully redefines, wins. And this is why Christians are not faring well in the current battles over homosexuality. We will not reverse this trend without some imaginative warriors. Not only do our adversaries want to redefine marriage, they want to do so because they have already claimed the right …
Making It Flow to the End
In the Syria saga, we are getting a good glimpse of how political decisions are made in a gargantuan democracy, and we are also getting quite a cash payout — worth a great deal to me at any rate — of Ron Paul’s apparently quixotic presidential runs. Let me state the conclusion first. I am …
Marcion After a Couple of Beers
Robert Farrar Capon has gone to be with the Lord (1925-2013), and there are a couple of nice retrospectives here and here. For sheer exuberance in writing, that man had few who could keep up with him. In the great cross country race for the colorful metaphor, he was the kind of runner who could …
Tell At a Glance
“Sometimes constant medical care is necessary, for example, and a nursing home is unavoidable. But all faithful family members should be able to tell at a glance the difference between abandoned and loved, and all outsiders should remember the difference between having all the facts and not having them” (For a Glory and a Covering, …
A Three Car Funeral
Spotify just informed me that Vince Gill had listened to Merle Haggard’s “The Fightin’ Side of Me,” and so naturally, I did too. It had been, what? — thirty years? Maybe more than that. Apart from how Congress votes on Syria, and regardless of what Obama does after that, we are not really in a …
At the Top of the Siege Ladders
“As men and women grow old together, many people’s natural response is pity. Because the elderly can’t ‘keep up’ anymore, they are thought of as society’s stragglers. Sometimes this comes out in exasperation (on the freeway, when we’re behind somebody in geezer drive), and other times in pity, but the root assumption is the same. …
Syria in a Sentence
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 …