“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).
Cultural Backbone
Chesterton once commented that a man who does not believe something will fall for anything. The observation certainly holds for societies, and only a blind man could fail to miss that such a necessary gullibility is currently driving our culture. The gullibility is not created by various social pressures; rather, such pressures reveal the gullibility. …
The People Had a Mind to Work
One of the great blessings which was given to Nehemiah in the course of his life was blessing of a people ready for work. “So we built the wall, and the entire wall was joined together up to half its height, for the people had a mind to work” (Neh. 4:6). The gift of an …
Age Before Duty
“The single most important fact about the early twenty-first century is the rapid aging of almost every developed nation other than the United States: Canada, Europe, and Japan are getting old fast, older than any functioning society has ever been and fast than any has ever aged. A society ages when its birth rate falls …