When the movie Amazing Grace came out, for various reasons Nancy and I were unable to see it. But it has just recently been released to DVD, and we just now finished watching it. The movie tells the glorious story of William Wilberforce and his fight against the slave trade in the British Empire. For …
Impromptu Answers to Prayer
Some time during high school, I worked for a summer or two (I forget) up at Cedar Campus, a Christian retreat center in Michigan’s upper peninsula. I have a number of fond memories of that place. Actually one of my earliest memories is of that place as well — I think I was around five, …
Green Lament for Sale at Wal Mart
I recently heard the new Eagles album was pretty good, and so I went and looked on iTunes for it. Nothing. A day or so later, I popped into a small record store downtown to ask about it, and the gentleman from the sixties running that place said, yes, it was in fact out, but …
Rejected Pop Tart Flavors
And there’s more to be found here.
Billy Collins and Other Sentimentalists
Just finished reading The Trouble With Poetry by Billy Collins (and other poems, the subtitle helpfully adds), and was struck by how metaphor handles are on everything, and how you just need to know how to find them. Most people just look at things right side up, but others — poets, madmen, and Chesterton — …
Our Very Own Massive Contradiction
“No doubt future social historians will find the contradiction between our concern about sexual abuse, on the one hand, and our connivance at and indifference to precocious sexual activity, on the other, as curious as we find the contrast between Victorian sexual prudery and the vast size of the Victorian demimonde” (Theodore Dalrymple, Life at …
Which Explains a Lot
“The architects thought that modernity was a value that transcended all other virtues; they thought they could wake the country from its nostalgic slumber, dragging it into the twentieth century by pouring what seemed to them the most modern of building materials—reinforced concrete—all over it” (Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom, p. 146).
A Certain Logic Undeterred
“We beat our brethren till they cry, and then we beat them because they cry” (Burroughs, Irenicum, p. 319).
Instead of Running Away from Barth
This looks really interesting. It appears that our Reformed brethren based in the UK didn’t get the same internecine fraticide memo that we all did over here. Although I am sure someone over there will write and let me know about something going on. Anyhow, I look forward to the day when the different strands …
The Poor Are a Gold Mine
“Indeed, homelessness is the source of employment for not negligible numbers of the middle classes. The poor, wrote a sixteenth-century German bishop, are a gold mine; and so, it turns out, are the homeless. For example, in one hostel for the homeless that I visited, located in a rather grand but disused and deconsecrated Victorian …