One of the posts yesterday on justice generated a really fruitful discussion, and here is a follow up to some of those issues. When Peter and Susan go to the old professor about Lucy’s weird behavior, he gives them a basic lesson. Edmund was saying sane things, but his character was problematic. Lucy was saying …
Immanuel Kant and Tom Hanks
Brian Mattson has a good post here on Kant and a Tom Hanks movie. What cracks me up is God’s irony in naming — Old Immanuel “God with us” Kant.
The Cape and Beret Problem
“The artist was still the Gentleman, not yet the Genius. After the French Revolution, artists began to leave the salons and cénacles, which were fraternities of like-minded souls huddled at some place like the Café Guerbois rather than a town house; around some romantic figure, an artist rather than a socialite, someone like Victor Hugo, …
What Universe?
As I continue my kibbitzing about postmodernism, using Stanley Grenz’s primer on the subject for my launching points, I want to reiterate that I am not yet directly critiquing Grenz. There are some indirect critiques of how he represents the pomos, but we won’t see until later in the book how much distance he (successfully …
Hamas, Pat Robertson, Little Geneva, and You
All right. Let’s stop fooling around with the tame stuff and talk about ethnically sensitive issues. Pat Robertson recently put his foot in it by saying that God was judging Ariel Sharon (via that stroke) because Sharon dared to divide the land of Israel (by relinquishing Gaza). The general outcry was indignant and self-righteous, and …
The Cult of Intolerance
“And that was the final irony: that an intellectual establishment that had dedicated itself for thirty-five years to the Nonjudgmental gods of tolerance and open-mindedness should finish as an anti-intellectual cult of intolerance, propped up and held in place by a vast network of cultural prohibitions and quasi-legal injunctions, and distinguished chiefly for its poverty …
Gluggity Gluggity
“‘It is with narrow-souled people as with narrow-necked bottles,’ said Pope: ‘the less they have in them, the more noise they make in pouring it out’” [Bryan F. Griffin, Panic Among the Philistines (Chicago, Regnery Gateway, 1983), p. 183.]
A Democratic Downgrade
“The phenomenon was in part merely an unpleasant by-product of mass education: a man who might have done no harm as a head footman a century or two ago can do tremendous harm as an assistant professor or a film critic.” [Bryan F. Griffin, Panic Among the Philistines (Chicago, Regnery Gateway, 1983), p. 183.]
All About Sex
Brian McLaren recently posted some comments on, you guessed it, homosexuality, and, as might be expected, he was strong on the need to be what he was pleased to call “pastoral,” and weak on what was known, in another day and time, as “biblical.” He was asked by a young couple what his church’s position …
Almost As Real As Movie Reviews
“The same might have been said not only of Time itself but of most of the American popular press. All over the land of the free, hip little film critics were celebrating the exhibition of Mr. Ripploh’s lower orifices with the words and phrases they’d memorized while studying for their Master’s degrees. ‘The latest film …