Clutching at Novelty

“A dying civilization, Christendom, on a swiftly moving, ebbing tide, clutches at any novelty in art and literature, ready to accept and then almost at once reject whatever is new no matter how perverse or abnormal. We have a ‘weariness with striving to be men,’ as the American critic Leslie Fiedler put it” (Malcolm Muggeridge, …

Wet Streets Cause Rain

The second chapter of Hitchens’ book is entitled “Religion Kills.” Well, in this world of hardscrabble Darwinism, nature red in tooth and claw, what doesn’t? Religion kills, but so does cancer, old age, hunting accidents, radiation from the sun, other predatory species, too much mayonnaise, and the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber. Actually, we need …

Crisis of Faith

Christians still have to get used to the idea that non-believers are the establishment. And once they are accustomed to that notion, they have to come to realize that it is at bottom good news. In the last century, when the orthodox Christian establishment capitulated to the incoming waves of modernism, liberalism, Darwinism, and collectivism, …

B Follows A

“As the bumper sticker says, if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns. Likewise, if (as Europe has done) you marginalize religion, only the marginalized will have religion. That’s why France’s impoverished Muslim ghettos display more cultural confidence than the wealthiest enclaves of the capital” (Mark Steyn, America Alone, p. 47).

Living Like a Trinitarian

I recently told a class of tenth-graders that what our culture needed was a return to trinitarian bubble-gum commercials. They were a little nonplussed, and so I hastened to explain. Individuals with one set of ultimate commitments have the capacity to live in alien soil, that is, a culture with a different set of commitments. …