“It is hard to miss the redemptive themes in the many dreamy scenes of sensuality that we have so often seen in perfume advertisements, scenes that waft across the viewing public with the promise of bodily regeneration, even renewed sexual attraction, if one simply purchases the product.” [David Wells, Losing Our Virtue (Grand Rapids, MI: …
The Lord’s Prayer, After All
This was the exhortation in the call to worship a few years ago when we first introduced the Lord’s Prayer into our worship service. This morning we have the privilege (and high responsibility) of introducing the Lord’s Prayer into our public worship of God. This will be done at the conclusion of the prayer of …
Statement on St. Peter
Randy Booth, the moderator of the CREC Council, has posted a statement on the situation at St. Peter. That statement can be found here.
The Lure
“Advertising, which is a large part of our public world, has learned how to dip its bucket into the well of our inner desires and fantasies; it projects those desires and images as part of its merchandising prowess” [David Wells, Losing Our Virtue (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), p. 109]
Souls Without Gravity
“Thus the freedom to ‘be one’s self’ was soon held hostage to the views of others, the world of fashion, and the pressure of social trends. And without a clear sense of the self, the ability to deny the self began to weaken. Standards became blurry, and without a religious framework of meaning to give …
Your Earth, Oh Lord, Is Full of Grace
Minister: Lift up your hearts! Congregation: We lift them up to the Lord! Great God, You are my portion now, And I will keep Your words. I have entreated all Your grace, With all my heart and all my soul, Be merciful and keep Your Word. I have considered all my ways, And turned my …
Getting to Know You
“With some of our technologies, the encounters are superficial and we are engaged little. Others, however, intensify these relations. This is true of television, some of whose characters become more real to us than the people next door, for our contact with the person whose image we see is far more sustained, and perhaps far …
Our Lady of Westminster
Marian obedience, the jewelry of God, has adorned    the gracious necks of many women,         hearts rejoicing in God their Savior.                Fiat mihi. Margaret Wilson, tied to a stake,    struggled and drowned,     filled with water,          yet full of grace.Marie Durant—behold this handmaiden of the Lord—     spent 38 years in a forsaken tower by the sea,     rather than …
Almost As Rule-Guided As A Sonnet
Forty things that only happen in movies can be found here. Inexplicably, they left out the red wire/green wire moment, but they came close to covering the waterfront here. HT: David Field
Values Instead of Virtues
“Expressive individualism, which grew out of the Romanticism of the late eighteenth century and today has an especial affinity with our therapeutic culture, assumes that all people have a unique core of intuitions and feelings within them that is then coupled with the understanding that they have the inherent right to pursue and express these …