At the Top of the Siege Ladders

“As men and women grow old together, many people’s natural response is pity. Because the elderly can’t ‘keep up’ anymore, they are thought of as society’s stragglers. Sometimes this comes out in exasperation (on the freeway, when we’re behind somebody in geezer drive), and other times in pity, but the root assumption is the same. …

Why Cigarette Smoking is Not a Sin for Others. Just a Sin for You.

Here is the general outline of a talk I gave on August 24, 2010 at Collegiate Reformed Fellowship. Reposting it again three years later for obvious reasons. My point this evening is not that smoking cigarettes is a sin everywhere and for everyone, under any conceivable circumstance. My thesis is a great deal simpler than …

Book of the Month/September

So this is a book that I really did not expect to be reviewing as my book of the month selection, but life is funny. Mind & Cosmos is subtitled “Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.” When a book with this kind of subtitle comes out, written by a philosopher …

The Church in The Pilgrim’s Progress

For a few years now one of my side hobbies has been that of defending and/or explaining The Pilgrim’s Progress. For various reasons, modern Christians have taken it into their heads to feel very superior to it, I can’t really explain why. Our generation has a very cordial dislike of allegory, but the medievals were …