William F. Buckley went to be with the Lord yesterday, and I cannot let the moment pass without acknowledging, however inadequately, my many obligations to him. I attended high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan from 1968 to 1971, and those were, as some of you no doubt recall, zany times in a zany town. I …
How Big a Problem is Porn?
Here is some good news, I guess, depending on how you look at it, but bear with me for a moment. I have long had trouble with people who try to encourage or alarm us with raw numbers alone. Raw numbers alone are often a very misleading part of the story. An example would be …
Discipline in Context
Yesterday’s sermon was third in a series on loving little children. You can find it here.
Cool and Uncool
“But what is cool anyway? For a passion so prominent in our hearts, we barely notice it, or think about it. We watch our tempers, we control our appetites, and we surrender our jealousies to God, but cool flies below our radar . . . I am defining cool as the private performance of rebellion …
Serious Filums
A few days ago I stumbled across a documentary on the trials of movie makers in dealing with Hollywood’s rating association, the one that supplies ratings for filums. I didn’t watch it long, and what I did watch was kind of choppy because the raunchy clips required channel-switching, but still it was quite informative. The …
Sex, Sexuality, Gender and Everything In Between
It looks as though Wheaton has had a speaker (Jim Wallis) who (according to this report) believes that homosexual rights issues are biblical “justice” issues, and who is in favor of civil unions for homosexuals. Let’s work with this for a moment. The problem is not that Wheaton is having a speaker with such convictions. …
Loving Little Ones 3
INTRODUCTION: Mankind has had, in various cultures, different metaphors to describe the workings of our internal psychology. For example, we easily speak of the difference between the “head” and the “heart.” The head represents propositional assent while the heart represents genuine commitment. But the biblical writers had a different set of internal organs to represent …
Regulatory Fascism
One more comment needs to be made about Jonah Goldberg’s very fine book, Liberal Fascism. In order to follow the argument here, it is necessary to make a fundamental distinction that very few in modern political discourse are able to make — because of the prevalence of fascist assumptions — and that distinction is the …
A Name for Your Next Son
I am just now finishing up one of the most satisfying books I have read in a long time — Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism. I will be posting further comments on the book in the future, but for now it should suffice to say that anyone who is in the slightest degree interested in the …
The Last Words of David
The Preamble of the Constitution of the State of Idaho includes this: “We, the people of the State of Idaho, grateful to Almighty God for our freedom, to secure its blessings and promote our common welfare do establish this Constitution.” Later, the same Constitution says: “All political power is inherent in the people. Government is …