“Young whites hired R&B bands for high school dances and frat parties. Then the craze spread to the North, where it was picked up by an enterprising DJ in Cleveland named Alan Freed, who decided to make a splash with an R&B radio show aimed specifically at white youth. To mask the racial origins of …
Fall Conference
It was recently brought to my attention that I missed a question in the comments section of one of my shameless appeals. David Bayly asked this about our ministerial conference in October: “Further information on this would be helpful for those of us who have to plan significantly ahead to attend such conferences. For instance, …
Anselm and Creedal Advance
As surprising as it may seem to some, the church grows and matures in her understanding over time. In other words, some battles are actually won, and certain doctrines are really established, and they stay established. Some of this can be seen in the pages of the New Testament, and other examples are found at …
Their Consistency is Our Hypocrisy
“What the Crusaders did to the Muslim inhabitants of Jerusalem in 1099 was as bad as what the Muslims had done to countless Christian cities before and after that time, but the carnage was less pardonable because, unlike the Muslims’, it was not justifiable by Christian religious tenets. From the distance of almost a millennium, …
Commie Criticism
“By insisting that most art, high and low, exists for the sole purpose of reinforcing bourgeois-capitalist consciousness, the ‘critical theorist’ gets to be a revolutionary. But by dictating the handful of exceptions that achieve true ‘negation,’ he also gets to be a snob” (Martha Bayles, Hole in our Soul, p. 78).
Refined Seven Fold
In the contemporary debate on the authority of Scripture, the only real concern I have with words like inerrant or infallible is that they are not strong enough. The doctrine of sola Scriptura has two components. The first is that Scripture is the only infallible authority we have. The second is that Scripture is the …
Isaiah 5:20
“But it [perverse modernism] did foster a climate in which artists were seen, by themselves and others, as implacably opposed to the values of ordinary people; and in which contempt for morality was seen, by elites and common people alike, as a mark of superiority” (Martha Bayles, Hole in our Soul, p. 45).
Fear of Feasting
Augustine exhorted us somewhere to love God and do as we please. This makes us nervous, and more than a little bit jumpy. Of course the protection resides in the first clause – loving God affects what will please us. Psalm 37:4 says that if we delight in the Lord He will give us the …
Republican Ra Ra
Well, here is the last post on Crunchy Cons. I have to get this one out of the way before I start in on Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion. There are parts of this section, particularly when Dreher is focussing on diagnosis, that are magnificent. There are other places where his implied solution (or …
Spurgeon the Great
We live in a time when preachers are told they must not really be preachers, but rather entertainers, facilitators, masters of ceremonies, or whatever the next hot-selling guru book for preachers will say they must be instead of preachers. This is all done in the name of making the gospel relevant and palatable to the …