“A citizen of an advanced democracy expects to be able to choose from dozens of breakfast cereals at the supermarket, hundreds of movies at the video store, and millions of porno sites on the Internet, but when it comes to life-or-death decisions about his own body he’s happy to have the choice taken out of …
Believing Skepticism
“Next to this genius of Pascal’s words I would draw your attention to the beautiful lucidity of his mind, the wonderful clarity of his thought. Like all true believers, he was deeply skeptical” (Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom, p. 4).
Greeting Cards and the Atonement
Afflicted with pretty much everything, the modern church is certainly looking around for remedies. But where and how we look for these remedies remains a function of what ails us, and we are not yet desparate enough to ask for directions to the divine pharmacy. How are we to explain our general cultural irrelevance? On …
A Cornucopia of Bushwah
The evangelical world is still sitting under modernity’s table, eager for any crumbs that may fall our way. The big news down here is when some rock star or other intimates that it is possible that, under certain conditions, he might believe in a divine being other than himself. We snatch it up eagerly and …
Approaching Democratic Realities
“When a European jihadist blows something up, that’s not in defiance of a democratic reality but merely a portent of democratic reality to come. He’s jumping the gun, but in every respect things are moving his way. You may vaguely remember seeing some flaming cars on the evening news toward the end of 2005. Something …
The Silence of Live Meaning
“Never has there been a more hectic prodigality or specialized erudition—in literary studies, in musicology, in art history, in criticism, and in that most Byzantine of genres, the criticism and theory of criticism. Never have the metalanguages of the custodians flourished more, or with more arrogant jargon, around the silence of live meaning” (George Steiner, …
Candy Prizes at a Kids’ Party
The next chapter of Dreher’s Crunchy Cons was really, really good. I say this because he went after some pet peeves of mine with a meat axe. The chapter was entitled “Home,” but a more informative title would have been something like “The Architecture of Home.” “Drive through a historic district of any town or …
Cultural Impact of Worship
For good or ill, the church leads the way in our culture. Long before feminism became the force it is in our general culture, the feminization of the church was already old news. Long before subjectivism became a way of life for most Americans, Christians had been groping around in the closets of the soul …
One or the Other
“In the spring of 2002, I met many Arabs who believed simultaneously that (a) September 11 was pulled off by the Mossad and (b) it was a great victory for the Muslim people” (Mark Steyn, America Alone, p. 17).
True “Soul”
“We are told, in tones of punitive hysteria, either that our culture is doomed—this being the Spenglerian model of rational apocalypse—or that it can be resuscitated only through a violent transfusion of those energies, of those styles of feeling, most representative of ‘third-world’ peoples. Theirs is true ‘soul,’ theirs the beauty of blackness and eros. …