Yesterday I gave a talk to the Logos secondary as part of their Knights Festival, as a lead-in to their banquet. The text I was using was Luke 14, and I noticed something there I had not seen before. Jesus is breaking bread with one of the chief Pharisees (Luke 14:1). That is the context …
Spooky Numbers
A friend sent me this link and I almost posted it, and then a few days later I saw it on Mark Horne’s blog and decided to put it up here. The numbers are creepy any way you think about it, but I do wish there were another set of numbers alongside these. I believe …
Justice Is Not Patty-Cake
In his otherwise admirable book on evil, N.T. Wright makes the drastic mistake of leaving the subject of Hell entirely alone. But no matter how many helpful things you say, if you leave the really huge question out, then all you are really displaying is a real loss of proportion. “Well, other than that, how …
Quinquennium Neronis
The infamous Nero actually had a good run initially. He took power in 54 A.D. and until 59 (the same year he had his mother killed), Rome enjoyed a mini-golden age, the best since the time of Augustus. That period of time was one remarkable enough to be named the quinquennium Neronis. But between 59 …
Gravity and Supply and Demand
The law of supply and demand is not a mere cultural artifact. In short, it is not comparable to the decision-making process that the lords of etiquette went through when deciding where the dessert fork should go relative to your plate. A moment’s reflection should tell you that they could have decided pretty much anything, …
The Tyranny of Relativism
I ran across this great observation in the latest edition of The New Criterion. The issue was a symposium on what Pope Benedict called, shortly before his election as pope, the “dictatorship of relativism.” That pregnant phrase almost says it all. At any rate, William Stace said, and I would echo it with bells on, …
The World’s Last Conservative Cook
Once there was a man who didn’t believe in flipping hamburgers when he was barbequing. As a result, his wife didn’t ask him to cook very often, but sometimes he would just volunteer, and then, there everybody was. The result of his unique approach was, of course, that either a hamburger was charred on one …
On Losing Your Shirt Like a Christian
We are far enough into this meltdown that we are starting to see its effects on individuals, and this of course includes individuals in the church. We are talking about layoffs, losses in retirement accounts, housing investments going south, and all the rest of it. If Christians are called to understand the times they are …
On Not Watching the Punch and Judy Show
As Obama is settling in to doing his thing, a couple of observations. The first is that Obama is a very different kind of slick than Bill Clinton was. Clinton’s was more a function of greasiness than anything else. Obama is disciplined, sharp, shrewd, and fully capable of coopting thin veneer conservatives. And all the …
But Then It Didn’t
“A variant that was not sent down from the top was ‘the revolution of the sixties,’ a sort of Rousseauist hope that by destroying the ‘hypocrisy’ of petty bourgeois, Christian-tinged morality and conventions, a new ‘Age of Aquarius’ would drop down out of somewhere” (Harold O.J. Brown, The Sensate Culture, p. 229).