While their benefits have no doubt been many, church pageants have also had the unfortunate result of making us think that biblical characters did little more than stand around in their bathrobes. The first time someone graduates from such images to an “actual read” through the Old Testament, the effect can be more than a …
And We Are Not Even Counting Ahmed
“What’s the Muslim population of Rotterdam? Forty percent. What’s the most popular baby boy’s name in Belgium? Mohammed. In Amsterdam? Mohammed. In Malmo, Sweden? Mohammed. By 2005, it was the fifth most popular boy’s name in the United Kingdom” (Mark Steyn, America Alone, p. 6).
And Lord Acton Knew His Onions
“The strong man with the dagger is followed by the weak man with the sponge” (Lord Acton, as quoted in Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge, p. 236).
And A Cause of No Little Trouble
“This is far enough for you to go in judging your brother: ‘Were I in his condition, should I do as he does, I should go against my light. I should act against my conscience.’ But therefore to conclude that he goes against his light, and acts dishonorably, is very sinful. Many carnal men think …
Getting Ready
Steyn comments on “the belated realization among Europeans that they’re elderly and fading and that their Muslim populations are young and surging, and in all these clashes the latter are putting down markers for the way things will be the day after tomorrow” (Mark Steyn, America Alone, p. 5).
Not Much Changes
“In its impact on people’s behavior and sense of ‘alienation’ and by its apparent sincerity of feeling, The Stranger came close to becoming the mid-twentieth century equivalent of Goethe’s best-selling The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), which provoked hundreds of suicides all over Europe” (Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge, p. 161).
Yuppie Belt-Tightening
The third chapter of Crunchy Cons is on food. In it Dreher describes his move away from his old way of thinking, where food was simply “ballast, and nothing more” (p. 57). Even while he is describing how food became more and more important to him and his wife, he is able to disarm objections …
Our Cultural Tongue
If a pastor were to begin a series of messages on “the tongue,” more than a few of his listeners would start running a finger around the inside of their collars. They would do this before he had even said anything on the subject — we all know that gossip, and backbiting, and inane conversation …
Within A Generation
“More immediately, Europe will be semi-Islamic in its politico-cultural character within a generation. In the fourteenth century, the Black Death wiped out a third of the Continent’s population; in the twenty-first, a larger population will disappear — in effect, by choice. We are living through a rare moment: the self-extinction of the civilization which, for …
And Democracy is Us Listening to the Voices in our Head
“In other words, no one may rightly judge Demos except Demos. God, insofar as there is one, is synonymous with Community” (Bernard Iddings Bell, Crowd Culture, p. 103).