I just finished a fantastic read by Peter Jones. Entitled The God of Sex, the subtitle explains his theme further — “How Spirituality Defines Your Sexuality.” Really good stuff and highly recommended. I believe that Canon Press will be offering it sometime soon. And this leads to some additional observations on this general subject. I …
Voting in the House of Rimmon
I have said earlier that if Obama is elected, it will be a holy cow moment. And that is true enough. He would be a terrible president. And it is not surprising that conservatives go weak in the knees at the mere prospect. But when it comes to politics and culture, our first duty is …
X-Ray Glasses and Women’s Dresses
What the world of high theology needs, not to mention the world of high philosophy, and the closely related world of high jinks, is a horse doctor dose of pastoral cynicism. Let me illustrate. If you were to give x-ray spectacles to one thousand thirteen-year-old boys, we should assume that all of them would use …
A Prophetic Voice Gets Laryngitis
Here are just a few additional thoughts on the Biden/Palin debate. I will not say a lot about Biden, who came off as fairly experienced and just this side of sleazy. He clearly had lots of facts and figures at his fingertips, but, on the down side, many of them were wrong. If Palin had …
No Gaffes to Embarrass the Republic
I will have more to say about all this later, but I wanted to get just a few words in about the Biden/Palin debate tonight. My comments here are just some more amateur punditry, and not a continued discussion of the previous, um, themes, we have been discussing. In other words, quite apart from whether …
And He Wasn’t Even American
C.S. Lewis wrote a poem once—Lines During a General Election—and the first two lines go like this: “Their threats are terrible enough, but we could bear All that; it is their promises that bring despair . . .”
Which Explains a Lot of Church Services
“Postmodernism is a turning from rationality, and at the same time an embracing of spectacle” (Arthur Hunt, The Vanishing Word, p. 185).
Why Sexual Issues Are To Be Front and Center
Our culture’s wholesale abandonment of biblical ethics in matters of sexuality — what I have recently called pomosexuality — is the direct and immediate result of a failure of the Church to proclaim and live out life in Christ, life in the gospel, life in the triune God. So the way out of this impasse …
Hard Truth and Soft Comfort
As you first start coming to grips with your responsibilities in your son’s defiance and rebellions, you will have sort through the attempts at comfort that many Christian friends will offer. You will also have to learn how to reject the same suggestions that proceed every human beings natural inclination to self-justification. That false comfort …
Sex, Violence, and a Grand Identity
“Paganism can take a variety of forms, but when all is said and done, the system boils down to three simple postulates—sex, violence, and a grand identity . . . For four centuries the Protestants tried to hold them back, but the dam was breached. The gods are back in town” (Arthur Hunt, The Vanishing …