“Despite the whirlwind of trends, Details retains a unifying philosophical viewpoint — the archetypical American male is a rebel consumer . . . ‘These guys are not only musicians, or even rock stars,’ the magazine affirmed, ‘but modern men, emblems of a new masculinity.’ These ‘rock and roll samurai live outside the law, but are …
Don’t Sugar Coat It. Just Tell Them.
“The late Joseph Bayly wrote a delightful little book some years ago called The Gospel Blimp, which lampooned the earlier forms of this kind of evangelistic absurdity, back when inane evangelicalism was still slogging it out in the minors. It is hard to imagine what a man of his gifts would do with the embarrassment …
Many Thanks to God
“The righteous cry, and the Lord heareth, and delivereth them out of all their troubles” (Ps. 34:17). I wanted to take a moment and ask all our friends to thank the Lord with us. We just received word that the Attorney General’s office in Boise has dropped the perjury complaint that was filed against me …
The Prosaic Ceiling
Indulge me for a moment. I am working through a volume of poetry by Robert Siegel, The Waters Under the Earth, which I am really enjoying. I would encourage you to do the same. Get it today! Christmas is coming! But in the course of reading him, some unsettled thoughts about poetry that I have …
Business Opportunity
From time to time, we get inquiries from people who are thinking about moving here to Moscow. One of the great concerns about doing this is that pesky detail of making a living. If anyone out there is in this position, I know of a good business opportunity here (a business for sale) that requires …
Department of Hip Resources
“The people who staff the Combine aren’t like Nurse Ratched. They aren’t Frank Burns, they aren’t the Church Lady, they aren’t Dean Wormer from Animal House, they are not those repressed old folks in the commercials who want to ban Tropicana Fruit Twisters. They’re hipper than you can ever hope to be because hip is …
Dreadlocks at Taco Bell
“But one hardly has to go to a poetry reading to see the countercultural idea acted out. Its frenzied ecstasies have long since become an official aesthetic of consumer society, a monotheme of mass as well as adversarial culture. Turn on the TV and there it is instantly: the unending drama of consumer unbound and …
A Picture Can Be A Thousand Times As Logocentric
For those who eschew definitions and logocentrism, but who still want to know what emergent is.
Reading Carefully
I am posting this here so that I don’t run into my own word limit (!) in the comment boxes. I don’t believe that Michael is reading McLaren carefully. And I know that he did not read or respond to my penultimate paragraph in the “What Actually Is the Case” post carefully. In his comment, …
What Actually Is the Case
The title of McLaren’s book, A Generous Orthodoxy, comes from a phrase coined by Hans Frei. And while there are serious objections to what Frei argues for elsewhere, he certainly has a firm grasp on the nature of pre-critical Christian thought. As he puts it, “In the earlier Protestant interpretive tradition, we have noted, the …