“The aim of untold millions is to be free to do exactly as they choose and for someone else to pay when things go wrong” (Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom, p. 5).
What a Marvelous Thought
The Moscow City Council election is now over, and the results are in. Congratulations to Tom Lamar, the top vote getter, as well as to the other victors — Steed, Krauss, and Carscallen. Lamar is a genuine liberal, but he showed a lot of class in this election. In the aftermath of the bigotry kerfluffle, …
Easily Led in One Direction Only
“When a man tells me, in explanation of his anti-social behavior, that he is easily led, I ask him whether he was ever easily led to study mathematics or the subjunctives of French verbs” (Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom, p. ix).
Just Like Alice’s Restaurant
“We build temples to the gods of commerce, and this is why the modern church looks like a shopping mall, sprawling and flat, plenty of parking, Visa and MasterCard accepted. In one city, a church mailed out hundreds of thousands of brochures hawking their wares. Come to our church, they said, and we’ll give you …
Machen and Wilkins
Darryl’s next chapter, on the rise of a democratized Protestant faith in America is quite good, and very helpful. Toward the end of the chapter, his doubts about democracy start come to the fore. “Rather than learning about democracy from Christianity, more often than not American Protestants have felt compelled to defend democracy under a …
Bigotry on Stilts
One of the drills that we go through here in our local controversies is this: our adversaries quote some outrageous thing from us, we say in reply that that’s “out of context,” and they say, “Yeah, right. You guys always complain that ‘it’s out of context.’ You just don’t like getting caught.” And so that …
The Matter Closed?
I said at the end of the previous post that I considered the matter closed. By that I meant that the Food Coop has done what they needed to do — they reprimanded an employee for distributing bigoted materials, and in so doing they have acknowledged that this kind of bigotry does exist in our …
Thanks to the Food Coop
A young lady, an employee of the Food Coop, has acknowledged on the radio that she was the one distributing the “boycott list” of kirker businesses out of the Coop, and that she was reprimanded for doing so. I want to publicly thank the Food Coop for taking action, for doing the right thing, and …
The Scapegoat
The first thing we must do is distinguish the scapegoat of Leviticus, and a coinage of William Tyndale, from the scapegoat of popular usage. Girard has something to say of the former, of course, but his focus is on the latter. He spends a good bit of time defending his approach against those academic skeptics …
Bigotry Is As Bigotry Does, Sez I
Okay, so I have a question. I would appreciate a public answer on this from any recognized spokesman for the Moscow Food Coop. A flyer identifying downtown businesses that are connected to “kirkers” — folks in our church community — has in recent weeks been handed out at the cash register of the Food Coop …