From time to time the authorities haul in some renegade cheese maker, and those who love bureaucratized food safety all breath a sigh of relief. This kind of tyranny is heavy-handed enough to get noticed by those who yearn for food freedom — as I do — but not so noticed generally that we can …
No Need for a Rental Unit
My friend Peter Leithart recently wrote about the end of Protestantism for First Things, which understandably excited some comment. Another friend, another Peter, provides an excellent and thoughtful rejoinder here. Peter Escalante brings much needed specificity to the question — the end of something as important as Protestantism, if actually pending, will need to be …
A Cycle of Pomes: Reflections
There once was a president-king Who could do most any cool thing Except writing code, (His limits there showed,) Now our health care is broke, in a sling. There once was an Obamono-whiz Whose health care rollout kinda fizz Led. And it crashed A new clunker for cash, Because that is just what it is. …
You Ain’t Gonna Make It With Anyone Anyhow
In this short piece, Michael Bird comes to the defense of N.T. Wright, nationalized health care, and all that is civilized. A good response to that can be found here, but one more thing needs to be said. What the soft Christian left does not appear to understand is that whenever the offering plate is …
Exhortation to Athanasius Presbytery (CREC)
One of the exhortations that ministers really need to hear from time to time is the exhortation not to lose heart. The reason they are tempted to lose heart is that the blindness and adamantine stupidity of sin simply seems invincible. What are we to do when the assigned task is to preach to hearts …
Not Really Luther
There is a famous Luther quote that he actually didn’t say, and which my son-in-law Ben Merkle recently tracked down. Here is the quote, and it is a hummer. “If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and …
Wisdom Walks
Unbelief devours people, and delights in it. Unbelief can consume one person, as an edible dainty from a passing tray, or, greedy as death, it can gulp them down by the pouch full — denominations, seminaries, publishing houses, families, and cities. Grendel, it is said, could grab thirty men at a time. And just as …
The Problem With Smart People
The real problem with smart people is that they so frequently aren’t. The confusion — of which we have many examples, alas — is between having a car with a really high rpm, and having a car that is on the right road. The two need not be the same thing at all. Look at …
Voting in a Wobbly Canoe
Yesterday I exhorted the saints at Christ Church to make sure that they voted in our local election tomorrow. In the course of that exhortation I said that it was not the church’s business to descend into partisan factionalism, but that it was our responsibility to pray that we would be allowed to “lead a …
Amending the Constitution to Mention Noah
A few days ago, I mentioned a question I had asked David Van Drunen during our time together at a conference in Dayton, Ohio. The background of the question was his understanding of the “two kingdoms.” He understands the two kingdoms to be the church on the one hand, the realm of redemption, and the …