“The flat roof was an article of faith for the Bauhauser, one whose religious dimensions would be exposed if the flat roof indeed did leak, which, as everyone knows, it indeed does. Once the impracticality of the flat roof becomes apparent, its antitranscendental meaning becomes obvious. When it comes to modern architecture, the flat roof …
A Ground of Irritation
“Or, it may be, many are counted scandalous who cannot legally and judicially be found to be such. For it is more easy to assert a scandal that to prove [one], even often when it is true. And it being rather a ground of irritation than edification, when a process is entered and not convincingly …
The World With A Flat Roof
“In the limited vocabulary of the architect, there are only a few terms available to express an attitude toward the transcendent, and the roof is one of the more important. The flat roof was an article of faith with the modern architect, no matter what the practical consequences . . . Whether it leaked or …
Public Rebuke
“If the offenses are of that nature that a public rebuke is necessary in respect of the circumstances and aggravations thereof, it is not to be neglected. Yet it is not necessary that every offense that comes to the eldership, yea even these that are known to many, should at all times be brought to …
The Surrender is Settled
In the previous post, I was (what is it we do these days? I forget) interfacing with James Smith’s book Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? This book is part of a series by Baker Academic, a series called “The Church and Postmodern Culture.” In the series preface, this is what we read: “How should concrete, in-the-pew …
What We Need Around These Parts Is A Good Dose of Van Til
I recently spent a goodish bit of time being exasperated by Richard Rorty, who doesn’t believe that we should view nature in the mirror of some glassy essence in our brains, which is fine with me, but he then spends many, many pages holding up his mirror for us to see philosophy in. But if …
Last Night’s Discussion
Last night I had a discussion on the radio with a fellow Christian and Christ Church critic, Keely Emerine-Mix. This was my opening statement, more or less, but, because I ran out of time, I did not get all the way through it. For those who want to check it out, the entire discussion can …
Trying to Destroy the West
“But, like the Oedipus Complex, Bauhaus architecture, moral relativism, contraception, deficit spending, the automobile, and cubism, saturation bombing was used as the twentieth century’s revenge on the cultural legacy of the West. It was an attempt to use the power of the West in order to destroy the West.” [E. Michael Jones, Living Machines (San …
You Can Say That Again
“The second thing, to wit, what order and manner is to be observed in the following of public scandals, is not easily determinable, there being such variety of cases in which the Lord exercises the prudence and wisdom of his church officers” (Durham, 53).
Machines for Living In
“By the time the rhetoric of modern architecture had been assembled into a modern ideology—let’s say by 1925—the form and the structure of the modern apartment, which was to replace the more traditional one-family dwelling as the preferred dwelling of socialist man, had become full of sociological meaning. Instead of man’s home being his castle, …