The famous story tells of the minister who wrote in the margin of his notes, “Argument weak. Shout here.” Whenever anyone is unalterably attached to a position, and that position is wrong, there is always a strong temptation to shout. Moreover, the sillier a position gets, the more shouting is required to keep people from …
With Everything at Sea Except for the Fleet
“Driven by postcolonial guilt and, without the loss of empire, the collapse of a world role, Britain’s elites have come to believe that the country’s identity and values are by definition racist, nationalistic and discriminatory” (Melanie Phillips, Londonistan, p. xix).
How the Media Cuts Our Meat for Us . . . Into Really Tiny Pieces
“The perception of a news show as a stylized dramatic performance whose content has been staged largely to entertain is reinforced by several other features, including the fact that the average length of any story is forty-five seconds” (Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 103).
Flannery Fanboys
Just a random Flannery O’Connor thought. I am currently enjoying Wise Blood very much, and it struck me how seriously O’Connor took her fundamentalist misfits. She was a Roman Catholic, and yet we find that her literary (and very Southern) genius really sees Jesus in the angular, raw Tishbite street preachers. She expects us to …
Are You a Republican or a Republicant?
Okay, so the presidential thingy is warming up again, and quite a few middle-aged men are grinning at the camera, glad-handing the public, stiff-arming the republic, and generally doing their part to snooker us yet again. I used to be a Republican, but have been an conservative independent for lo these many years now. Nevertheless, …
Better Than We Deserve
I am posting old articles here that ran in Table Talk, and this one was part of the run up to Y2K. Hence the situation is somewhat dated, but the principles involved certainly are not. The message at that time was that repentance is good preparation if disaster happens, and good preparation if it doesn’t. …
Typographic Man
“Almost all of the characteristics we associate with mature discourse were amplified by typography, which has the strongest possible bias toward exposition: a sophisticated ability to think conceptually, deductively, and sequentially; a high valuation of reason and order; an abhorrence of contradiction; a large capacity for detachment and objectivity; and a tolerance for delayed response” …
One Little Word Shall Fell Him
Christians are people of the Word, and as a result they are people of words. We love the Truth, and this is why we must necessarily love truths. The flip side of this is that when a love for the Lord Jesus declines, one of the first places it manifests itself is in an obvious …
A Question of Relative Strength
“A suicide bomber may be a weak weapon, but not against a suicide culture” (Mark Steyn, America Alone, p. 210).
But Not the Formality of an Open Mind
“Obviously, my point of view is that the four-hundred-year imperial dominance of typography was of far greater benefit than deficit. Most of our modern ideas about the uses of the intellect were formed by the printed word, as were our ideas about education, knowledge, truth and information. I will try to demonstrate that as typography …