Christianity Today has now posted the fifth exchange between Christopher Hitchens and me. This is the penultimate round, with the final round going up next week. You can find it here.
The Hebraic Mind
Careful students of church history see far more in it than names and dates, battles and councils, popes and reformers. The history of the church is very much a history of ideas. But in order to talk about the course and influence of these ideas, we have to talk about the various schools of philosophy …
Pornostan
“What do you call a jurisdiction split between post-Christian secular gay potheads and anti-whoring anti-sodomite anti-everything-you-dig Islamists? If Kurdistan’s an awkward fit in Iraq, how well does Pornostan fit in the Islamic Republic of Holland?” (Mark Steyn, America Alone, p. 120).
Huxley and Orwell
“Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy . . . This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right” (Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. vii-viii).
Watery, Obsolescent, Soft-Left Pap
“The United States has a strain of evangelical Protestantism strong enough to grow in the years ahead. Unfortunately, there is no such surging evangelicalism in Europe. In search of the guiding hand of God, some Europeans will return to Pope Benedict’s church, some will accept Islam, but there will be no takers for the archbishop …
Obvious When You Think About It
“Television is not vulgar because people are vulgar; it is vulgar because people are similar in their prurient interests and sharply differentiated in their civilized concerns” (George Gilder, Life After Television, p. 48).
That Ringleader Pride
“Though there are many in a riot, the whole blame usually is laid upon the ringleaders. Pride is the ringleader of all riots, divisions, and disturbances among us” (Burroughs, Irenicum, p. 158).
A Review of Leepike Ridge
Okay, let me get a couple things out of the way right at the outset. The first and most obvious is that I am embarking on a review of a novel written by my son, a story that I think is a real premium can of corn. So to speak. And so someone out there …
No Faith in Itself
“That’s why the Church of England and the Episcopal Church and the Congregational Church and the United Church of Canada and many others are sinking beneath the bog of their own relativistic mush, while Islam is the West’s fastest growing religion. There’s no market for a faith that has no faith in itself” (Mark Steyn, …
Big Brother”s Eyeball
“Yet television is at its heart a totalitarian medium. Because television signals originate at a single station and are sent top-down to the masses, tyrants everywhere push TV sets onto their people” (George Gilder, Life After Television, p. 46).