Think about this for a minute. I was heartened to see Sarah Palin’s endorsement of Doug Hoffman, the Conservative Party nominee in an interesting three-way congressional race in upstate New York. One of the reasons for supporting this race of Hoffman’s is that The Huffington Post called his public supporters a “traveling freak show of …
A Pleasant and Instructive Afternoon
It has been a while since I have said anything much about Girard, but this is not because I haven’t been thinking about it. Once you see the mechanism (of mimetic envy) that Girard outlines, it is difficult not to see it everywhere. Now there are some Girardian fan boys out there who do to …
Protesting Too Much
In my earlier post on Porn as Liturgical Corruption, I described a process whereby a minister who has a private problem with porn makes more and more room for his own compromises in his preaching. This is of course one response, but there are others. One commenter asked about such a man, one whose opposition …
Porn as Liturgical Corruption
This is just a short sketch of something that requires much fuller treatment. On top of that, this is a statement about just one aspect of this problem, and not an attempt to minimize the other problems that might be in play. Pastors are usually husbands as well, and this means that when a pastor …
Bottle Blondisity
Modern evangelicalism is a day-old doughnut, but this may require further explanation. We flatter ourselves by saying that evangelicalism is over here doing its thing, and American culture is over there marching to a different drummer entirely. If we are convicted by our sins and inconsistencies, we like to think that they are self-contained sins …
A Big Misunderstanding?
There is a new evangelical group blog that looks pretty lively, and which also looks like a good addition to the fray. HT: Justin Taylor It was there, however, that Jared Wilson wrote a bit on why the culture war will go to hell. He gave ten reasons that I would like to interact with …
Song of Songs Conference in the UK
For any of our friends near the northern part of London, you may want to check this out.
Killing and Dying
Just a quick note on a nagging problem in hermeneutics, a problem that pomo monkeyshines help serve to highlight. To the extent that pomo thinking robs us of an authoritative word, the more it tries to leave us with a series of bad choices, all of them arbitrary and capricious. Here is the dilemma: As …
Cheering for the Cowpie Channel
I have said before that I find Sean Hannity barely tolerable. Whenever I see him, which is rarely, Bill O’Reilly provides an ongoing trial of the purity of my sanctification. And I have only seen Glenn Beck for a few minutes in YouTube clips, but that man is clearly a histrionic specimen of the first …
The Second Ramp
I finished Jason’s book this morning. His last chapter, on assurance of salvation, was very good. His main interest was to critique the popular three-fold method of assurance (i.e. faith, good fruit, witness of the Spirit) — not because they could not be understood biblically, but because if they are treated as independent “lines of …