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 …
Good-Humored Berserker Bagpiper
Around the time of our city election a week or so ago, you may recall that the news broke that a list of Christ Church businesses was being circulated for purposes of boycotting them. There has been some fallout from all that which you might be interested in. This is not everything that happened, but …
Christian Living in Third Gear
Feeling Good About Behaving Badly
“This is the lie that is at the heart of our society, the lie that encourages every form of destructive self-indulgence to flourish: for while we ascribe our conduct to pressures from without, we obey the whims that well up from within, thereby awarding ourselves carte blanche to behave as we choose. Thus we feel …
The Hand of the Lord On Presbyterians
“Isaiah 9:21: ‘Manasseh against Ephraim, and Ephraim against Manasseh, and they together against Judah. For all this His anger is not turned away, but His hand is stretched out still.’ When we are thus one against another, the anger of the God is not turned away from us, and we may fear His hand will …