You lift up kings and throw them down. At Your Word, congresses and parliaments are tumbled into confusion and the babble of tongues, pundits, and 24 hour news coverage. You throw the ocean against the shore, And sometimes that shore is inhabited. Mothers cry and children are lost. Their surviving men curse the God in …
A Chaos of Opinions
Dear visionaries, Linda wrote that I must be frustrated at having to repeat myself, and repeats my question, “What standard are you appealing to, and why is that standard binding on anyone else?” To which I reply that it is no frustration. Just a lot of fun — like herding cats. She continued by reminding …
Part of the Problem
President Bush was recently in Turkey, and while there he commended that nation for having secular laws and simultaneously being a people of faith. This kind of compartmentalization that we are exporting around the world (entrenched as a way of life here) is precisely the attitude that is crippling the American church. The fact that …
Secular Fundamentalists
Dear visionaries, Before I left town, someone here hoped that the travel experience would broaden my horizons, and make me realize what beautiful and aesthetically satisfying civilization we have going here as a result of the whole Enlightenment project, which, in the minds of some, still does not exist. But I went to various places …
Owning the Curse
Owning the curse is not applauding the curse. Insisting that we deal with the manifold problems within the church first is not the same thing as saying we are abandoning the civil realm to the secularists. Insisting that the ship be made seaworthy is not to abandon the voyage. To illustrate what we are talking …
Some Basic Math
Dear visionaries, I am sorry to leave our discussion just when it gets to “the feast of reason and flow of soul” stage. But I will be out of town this next week. Have fun with this. Robert says: “What she advocates is that laws are created preventing someone from being fired . . .” …
Best of Luck
Dear visionaries, Mary responded to me with: “So, you evangelize the Palouse your way, and I’ll evangelize it mine.” Deal. And this brings us back to the original point of our discussion. Our schools, both private and at home, are filling and overflowing and yours are emptying out. Your ardent defense of reproductive rights amounts to the …
Swallowing the Reductio
Dear visionaries, It goes without saying that people who do not understand their own worldview, or, in some cases, don’t even know that they have one, or they assume it to be a straw man invented by others, and all this in a university town, are ill-equipped to understand the worldviews of others. But this …
Prerequisites
Once there was a man whose eye was always on the horizon. He cared very much about international and foreign affairs, and was constantly writing his congressman about national issues. He viewed the evening news every night, usually with alarm, and he did whatever he could to involve his friends in this sort of thing. …
Out of a Clear Blue Sky
True story. My wife and I earlier today were driving back home from the airport in Spokane, and about a second before it hit, I saw a cloud of what looked like pellets coming down out of the sky toward us. A bunch of them hit the windshield, and a moment later revealed their true …