“[In] America today the average square yardage of boyswear grows and grows, while the square inches in the girls’ outfits shrinks and shrinks. The boys carry so much fabric they look like skateboarding Bedouins, and the girls look like preppy prostitutes.” [David Brooks, On Paradise Drive (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. 56]
Foods of the World
“The rule in these pedestrian-friendly town centers is ‘Fight a way, gain a restaurant.’ You’ll find Afghan eateries, Vietnamese restaurants, Lebanese diners, Japanese sushi bars alongside dining options from Haiti, Cambodia, India, Mongolia, and Moscow. And this is not to even mention the Cosi-style casual dining spots offering shiitake mushroom panini sandwiches or the gourmet …
Sunday Morning Daylight Savings Snafu
As you perhaps know, everybody should have set their clocks ahead so that they could arrive at worship on time. This we did, and after services some of my kids (and their kids) came by our house after church for some of our usual eating and fellowship. They arrived here before we did, and were …
AmeriCool
“We sort of take coolness for granted because it is so much around us. However, coolness is one of those pervasive and revolutionary constructs that America exports around the globe. Coolness is a magical state of grace, and as we take our drive through America, we will see that people congregate into communities not so …
Suburban Supernova
“It’s as if Zeus came down and started plopping vast towns in the middle of the farmland and the desert overnight. Boom! A master planned community! Boom! A big-box mall! Boom! A rec center, pool, and four thousand soccer fields! The food courts come first, and the people follow. How many times in human history …
All the Western World’s An Ad
“The forces that affect it [our modern secular culture] are in the West the great commercialized amusement industries and in the East the forces of political propaganda. And I do not think that Christianity can ever compete with these forms of mass culture on their own ground. If it does so, it runs the danger …
Fruit In Its Season
“A Christian civilization is certainly not a perfect civilization, but it is a civilization that accepts the Christian way of life as normal and frames its institutions as the organs of a Christian order. Such a civilization actually existed for a thousand years more or less. It was a living and growing organism—a great tree …
The Loss of True Confession
“While we deplore the fracturing of life, its robberies and rapes, its abuses and cruelties, its assaults and catastrophes, we can no longer measure its darkness in the presence of God. All we can do is weep. We cannot make confession. There is no one to whom to confess. We cannot bring our sin before …
Prisoner or Professor?
“Conscience, then, is more like the moaning of a prisoner in his cell than the discourse of a professor at his lectern. It is an alarm signal whose noise can be turned down but not off. It is our interior reality, which is inexplicable in the absence of God and inconsolable apart from his grace.” …
Glossy Magazines Help You Reinvent Yourself
“With an extraordinary profusion of stylized goods to choose from – designer ties, designer scents, designer automobiles, and designer jeans – we now have a rich palette from which to paint our own meaning, to state our own identity.” [David Wells, Losing Our Virtue (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), p. 144]