“They will be on the sunny side wheresoever it is. Cunning heads and corrupt hearts will serve their own turns by all varieties of times. If they were in Diocletian’s time, they could be pagans; if in Constantine’s, Christians; if in Constantius’s, Arians; if in Julian’s, apostates; if in Jovian’s Christians again, and this within …
Fog-Cutter
I have finally settled into reading Pierced for Our Transgressions, and am happy to report that it is both a necessary book and a fantastic book. It is necessary because the current zeitgeist wants to drift away from penal substitution without talking about it, and it is a fantastic book because it shows how biblical …
Whitewash for the Sepulcher
“Sentimentality is the feeble attempt of our lax and liberal culture to claim innocence where there is transgression and perversity, to ignore tragedy in the desperate endeavor to feel comfortable” (Vigen Guroian, Rallying the Really Human Things, p. 61).
Moral Imagination
“If that is the imagination, what is the moral imagination? The eighteenth century British statesman Edmund Burke first coined the term in his great work Reflections on the Revolution in France . . . The moral imagination is the distinctively human power to conceive of men and women as moral beings . . . Modern …
Why Isn’t It Peaceful, Like Before?
“If the devil is put into a rage now more than before, it is a sign that he is more opposed than he was before. he possessed all in quiet before, but now his kingdom begins to shake” (Burroughs, Irenicum, pp. 328-329).
For Good or Ill, Imagination Rules the World
“The human heart’s desires may not be holy, and the imagination born of these unholy desires may even be demonic. After all, it was the tyrant Napoleon who hauntingly declared, ‘Imagination rules the world’ . . . Where there is no real moral imagination, itself a form of vision, the people will become captives of …
Grace or Law?
“A vision of the good has far greater power to move men and women to do the right thing than all the horrible images we may conjure up to terrify them into doing it” (Vigen Guroian, Rallying the Really Human Things, p. 10).
Not Called Limousine Liberals for Nothing
“The first duty of the modern intellectual, wrote George Orwell, is to state the obvious, to puncture ‘the smelly little orthodoxies . . . now contending for our souls..’ Orwell meant by these the totalitarian doctrines that mesmerized the intellectuals of his time and that prevented them from accepting the most obvious and evident truths …
The Devil’s Stragglers
“For example, the biblical pattern of evangelism was not at all like our modern method of picking off the devil’s stragglers, but rather a pattern of bringing the good news to household after household” (Mother Kirk, p. 236).
Scandals are Interchangeable
One of Girard’s conversation partners (Jean-Michel Oughourlian) says that it “is obvious that bringing to light the founding murder completely rules out any compromise with the principle of sacrifice” (Reader, p. 179). Well, no. Our task here is to point to some of the reasons why Girard falls into this either/or trap. “That is indeed …