In my interactions with Bishop Wright on the matter of Third World debt, I have a couple times had the sensation of having been here before. Somehow. Tonight it happened again, and so I picked up a mental thread and pulled on it. This is what came of that. This is how Dorothy Sayers began …
Suspicion and Bitterness in the Ministry
“Nor is suspicion merely a source of disquietude, it is a moral evil, and injures the character of the man who harbours it. Suspicion . . . creates . . . in ministers bitterness; such bitterness as in spirit dissolves all the ties of the pastoral relation, eating like a corrosive acid into the very …
They Come in Crates of Twenty-Four
What might seem like the simplest problem in the world — just forgive the debts, man, how hard can it be? — turns out to have massive complications. These complications are not offered as an argument for doing nothing, but rather as an argument for taking the time to get it right. There are a …
Kudzu in Idaho
In his book The Millennium Myth, N.T. Wright acknowledges that debt forgiveness willy nilly is not the way to go. “Some will warn [like DW] that debt cancellation without political change will be a gift to the tyrants and bullies, not to the poor and weak. Steps will have to be taken to make sure …
Introduction to Amos
The series will be interrupted almost right away because next Sunday is Ascension and the Sunday after that is Pentecost. But yesterday I began a series through the book of Amos, which will resume after Pentecost.
Don’t Let Gossips Drive the Ministry
“Every church, and, for the matter of that, every village and family, is plagued with certain Mrs. Grundys, who drink tea and talk vitriol . . . There are also certain persons who are never so happy as when they are ‘grieved to the heart’ to have to tell the minister that Mr. A. is …
Call It Straight
Just a quick follow up on a comment left in an earlier thread. We have names for things, and we need to make sure we use them. As the Church extends kindness to the widow and orphan — using tithes and offerings — we call this pure and undefiled religion. It is the vocation of …
A Big International Galoot
I write as a critic of American empire, not an opponent of it, if you catch my drift. America is doing what large, hegemonic powers have pretty much always done when in this position, and this behavior is not exceptionally vile, as the leftist screechers would have us believe, and it is not especially virtuous, …
Your Mother Cuts Your Meat for You
Several years ago, Pastor Leithart exhorted us, concerning the public reading of the Scriptures, to seek to listen to the Word rather than to just read along with it. This was done to encourage you to add the layer of simply hearing the Word in worship, and not to subtract the experience of reading the …
Go Get Your Own Parable, Hayek
This is kind of an odd talk-around way way to do it, but here is a bit more on our discussion of Third World debts and N.T. Wright’s book Surprised by Hope. To sum up my take, Wright wrote a glorious book that had a small atrocious section on global economics. I interacted with that …