“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]
Augustine Nails It
Sometime in the last few years I enjoyed reading through Faber’s Book of Aphorisms. Well, apparently, David Field liked that book too, and has been posting some of his favorites on his blog. This morning he put one up I did not remember, which is odd because it so aptly describes so much of what …
The Mirror Surface
“Style, therefore, may be an act of cannibalization as we take from others to create our own surface, even though it may be entirely unrelated to who we actually are. It is, however, who we want to be.” [David Wells, Losing Our Virtue (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), p. 143]
Whodda Thunk?
Here’s an interesting cluster of factoids. You know the general perception that conservatives are hard-hearted and stingy, right? And how liberals are overflowing with largesse? The comeback in debate is usually that their largesse is largely limited to other people’s money, but we now have more than a gut feeling. Turns out there is some …
The Savior Is Not From Boise
As homosexual marriage is gaining acceptance (in some places), we discover that polygamists are hard on the heels of the homosexual activists. Those who are interested in clear-sighted statement of the implications should read Charles Krauthammer here. There is absolutely no basis for jettisoning the conventional notion that marriage needs to be between members of …
Barracks?
Oh, great. Now I have to interrupt my hectic day to quash some more scuttlebutt. How’s a guy supposed to install an Al Qaida training camp on his acreage with all these irresponsible rumors flying about? Comes now one of the solons of Vision 20/20, who weighed in on the subject of our little development …