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).
A Few Brisk Ones
In a recent correspondence with a friend who is much more of a Girardian purist than I am, he said something like “all violence is righteous.” He was referring to the Giardian insight that human beings have a deep mimetic propensity to deceive and blind themselves, especially when it comes to matters of violence. The …
Have I Proved Too Much?
With regard to this “Violence and the Trinity” series, I got a great set of questions from a member of our congregation here, and so I asked him if I could interact with them publicly. He said sure, and so off we go. “I noticed that in a recent post you refer to several classic …
Herod is God Tee-Shirts
This really is an historic day, a day on which a black man will become president of the United States. That doesn’t make it a good day, but it does make it memorable and worthy of comment. Those who have followed my political writing for any time at all know that I have been very …
No Middle Ground
If we believe in the Bible, we believe in the Christian future. This means that the salt is not seasoning to no effect, and that the light is not shining to no effect. The labor we put forth to make the world a better place is not labor wasted (1 Cor. 15:58). Moreover, if we …
The Wahoo! Stimulus Package
Well, we are two days away from the Dawn of the Shining One, and so my thoughts have turned naturally to the coming wahoo! stimulus package, that fiscal hot air balloon with a diameter of about two miles and counting. We are talking about about a lot of money . . . actually make that …
Hep Cat Theology Circles
All right, then, let us take a particularly thorny test case — America’s use of atomic bombs on Japan near the end of the Second World War. Does that measure up to just war standards? If so, why? If not, why not? The answer I would give is “of course not,” but I am aware …
Marshmallows and Cotton Balls
God governs the world in such a way as to prevent us from thinking that we can be in the right simply by holding correct opinions. God governs our lives in such a way that we have to choose between two items on this Chinese menu here, and we are not permitted to slip away …
A Judicious Temperament
I was in wait-and-see mode on Rick Warren praying at the inauguration. My initial reaction was uh oh, but being as judicious and thoughtful as I am, I thought I would wait and see what he actually said in his prayer. The upshot is that I was fully prepared to praise him for participating in …