Charles Colson has done a lot of good stuff, and God bless him as he continues. But among his many good works, he has recently contributed to one the central muddles of our times. He did that here. In this Breakpoint commentary, he was responding to secular critics who are hyperventilating over the rising American …
Peter’s Boast
Once a correspondent asked C.S. Lewis why he was not a Roman Catholic. Because he did not want to sin against charity, he declined to answer in any detail, but there was an aspect of his response that would be surprising to many of us. “By the time I had really explained my objection to …
Perfectly Legal
Scripture teaches us that unbelievers suppress the truth in unrighteousness. But this language suggests that the operation is not effortless. In order to sin, and in order to persist in it, we have to fight against something that is true about ourselves. We are created in the image of God, and despite the fall into …
Go Figure
“Far from being seen as the mortal enemy of the causes that progressive opinion holds so dear, such as sexual freedom or equal rights for women and homosexuals, the Islamic jihad has turned into the armed wing of the British left” (Melanie Phillips, Londonistan, pp. 117).
An Artistic Clerisy
“Composers, artists, or architects in a compound began to have the instincts of the medieval clergy, much of whose activity was devoted exclusively to separating itself from the mob. For mob, substitute bourgeoisie—and here you have the spirit of avant-gardism in the twentieth century. Once inside a compound, an artist became part of a clerisy, …
The Sin With No Name
“This is a very shameful distemper. Some men will occasionally confess that they fear other men, and others that they love not other men, or that they condemn others; but no man will acknowledge that he envies others” (Burroughs, Irenicum, p. 180).
Irresistible Life
We already tend to misunderstand the nature of the relationship between God and His creatures, and so it is unfortunate that we sometimes use language calculated to perpetuate that misunderstanding. One term that is misunderstood in this way, in the view of many, is the irresistible grace of the famous TULIP. But is the misunderstanding …
Look At Me Go
I am the kind of techno maladroit who learns computerish things very slowly. No complaints here, no boasting — just the raw truth. So, for today’s lesson I am going to try to do two new things. Until a short while ago I did not know how to embed a video clip. I still might …
The Tropes of Anti-Semitism
“Throughout the Muslim world, the Nazi calumny and the tropes of medieval Jew-hatred have become assimilated into Islamic thinking . . . The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is treated as a basic text and sold throughout the Muslim world along with Mein Kampf” (Melanie Phillips, Londonistan, pp. 110-111).
Ugly Is As Ugly Does
“O beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, has there ever been another place on earth where so many people of wealth and power have paid for and put up with so much architecture they detested as within thy blessed borders today? I doubt it seriously. Every child goes to school in a …