“The fact of the matter is that we can no more choose our culture and its languages than we can our parents. A trendy academic recently urged his peers to make a careful selection among what he called our ‘cultural baggage.’ We should not deceive ourselves, however. If our culture and its traditions are baggage, …
French Fries and Diet Coke
Just got a card in the mail that breathlessly announced to me that a bunch of Bill Sali’s campaign war chest, not to mention that of Robert Vasquez, comes from “out of state special interests.” Whoa. That’s bad, we are supposed to think. Then the thought comes, who was kind enough to get word of …
They Feel Good All Over
“Like most modern tyrannies, the dictatorship of the politically correct has freely used and abused the rhetoric of virtue in its effort to enforce conformity and silence dissent. This is part of what makes it so seductive. How gratifying to know that one is automatically on the side of Virtue simply because one espouses the …
No Such Thing As Art In General
“Art is a discipline rooted in a specific culture.” [E. Christian Kopff, The Devil Knows Latin (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 1999), p. 24]
Free the Goldfish!
“Creativity is possible only as the final stage in a long, rigorous absorption of the teachings and discoveries of the past. The last thing we need for the future of our country or of our young people is one more lunatic smashing goldfish bowls in order to free the goldfish” [E. Christian Kopff, The Devil …
Intellectual Carnage
“There is perhaps no more dramatic index of the disaster that has befallen liberal arts education in this country than the contempt in which the new academic orthodoxy holds this constellation of ideas about the nature and goals of higher education. It would be difficult to overstate the resulting intellectual carnage” (Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals, …
Hospitality and Immigration
So the issue of the day is immigration. And our first reaction as Christians should always be “what does Scripture say about it?” A summary of biblical teaching is that immigration of a certain kind is a blessing, and is fruitful, both to the immigrant and the land to which he comes. Immigration of another …
Doublethink
“Perhaps Marcuse’s ability to reconcile liberty and dictatorship has come of age, and Orwell’s characterization of such thinking as ‘doublethink’ does not bring the flash of recognition that it once did” (The Shadow University, p. 96).
Deconstructing Nehushtan
“There is another sense in which we can ‘burn incense’ to a work of art. We can overmystify it, ascribing to it supernatural or religious functions The passage on the destruction of the serpent image says that ‘it was called Nehushtan.’ The Hebrew is rather ambiguous here, but the King James Version, in what scholars …
Card Tricks At Presbytery
As the Dah Vinchee imbroglio heats up, we see here the “answer a fool according to his folly” response. Turns out Barney Fife of Mayberry had a son . . . HT: Dale Courtney A young man in our congregation here at Christ Church invented his own amazing card trick, and it can see seen …