“Casualness is proper at times, but the trouble is we have made it a fetish. Whether shopping or going to school or even to church, we take too literally the invitation of the second-class hotel, ‘Come as you are.’ And the sloppier we come, the sloppier we tend to act. A slouch in the body …
Civilized Murder
[Speaking of those who want to kill Jesus in John 8] “But their murderousness is not simply moral perversion. it is fundamental. It is anthropological. It is structural. It is the ordering principle of culture, ‘hidden since the foundation of the world'” (Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled, p. 222).
Old Flat Top, Grooving Up Slowly
I have just a few random comments, public-service-announcement-wise. I put them under this category because it does relate to a couple of them, but taking one thing with another, this is just a mishmash. Besides, I need something random to go with the title. 1. Happy Thanksgiving. Take great care to eat too much, but …
Spiritual Disciplines in Narnia
The topic before us now is “spiritual disciplines” in the Narnia stories, and I have to begin by explaining the topic perhaps a little more than some of the others. Spiritual disciplines are those practices which should be practiced on a daily basis, so that they become habitual, with the result that you are prepared …
Inescapable Artistic Standards
“Until the artistic impulse is eradicated more thoroughly from human life than has so far been done, even by the best efforts of the metallic civilization of our day, we cannot get rid of the categories of good and bad or high and low in the field of art” (J. Gresham Machen, as quoted in …
The Death of Scandal in the Death of Jesus
“Ultimately, it was Jesus’ public execution and not his public ministry that consummated the biblical revelation, inspired the New Testament, launched the Christian movement, and eventually led to the anthropological crisis in which we now find ourselves. As the first Christians moved beyond the Jewish cultural orbit into the wider Greco-Roman world, they found people …
Nobility in Narnia
What does it mean to be noble? What is false nobility? And what does it mean to fail in nobility? These are all questions that will be answered if you read the Narnia stories they way they really ought to be read. Like Shasta in The Horse and His Boy, we too often have a …
Root and Fruit
“We must affirm then that at the deepest level there can be no mature Christian character which despises culture, any more than there can be a truly Christian culture which is not rooted in character” (Richard Taylor, A Return to Christian Culture, p. 17).
Deep Scandal
[Speaking of Matt. 18:1-9] “The first thing to notice is how the disciples’ lapse into mimetic rivalry evoked from Jesus a discourse on scandal and scandalizing. As I said, it seems at first a non sequitur. From the mimetic point of view, however, it is the perfect response. Jesus recognized his disciples anxiety about their …
True Character Is Measured By An Ability to Oppose a Lynch Mob
“The master thinkers of the Enlightenment inherited a Europe that had been buoyed up by the moral ethos of Christianity for so long that they thought they could scuttle the ark and wash ashore on the next tide. They were sure that reasonable people, with a wink from Voltaire and Rousseau, would walk away from …