This is a meal of gladness, and not of gloom. We see this in many different ways, but one of them can be seen in the elements that the Lord chose for us to remember Him by. “And wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil to make his face to shine, and …
The Christian Foundation of Free Markets
Yesterday I recorded a series of short interviews that will be aired on the Moody broadcasting network sometime in the next few weeks. We were talking about the imminent release of Is Christianity Good for the World? and in that context the impact of the Christian faith on culture came up. In the course of …
John Has Slain His Thousands
I am continuing all this in the spirit of thinking out loud. It should be obvious — even though I still have not made up my mind finally — that I really like Sarah Palin and believe that she might be uniquely positioned (in just a couple months) to really do something about Roe. Here …
Justin and Laura
Weddings are a wonderful way of proclaiming the gospel. Many aspects of the gospel are on display in weddings, and can be seen there in their true glory. Sometimes, when we merely talk about the gospel, we can get tangled up in definitions. When that happens, some people react away from those definitions as though …
A New Grad Program
We are really excited about this new grad program, partly because it enables Peter Leithart to show off a portion of his library. If you ever see the whole collection, you would agree with me that it just isn’t right for one man to have all those books. Excuse me . . . got derailed …
Next to Godliness
“Woks and iron skillets should be rinsed and wiped, never washed. If someone comes along and tells you cleanliness is next to godliness, the proper answer is, ‘Yes — next. Right now I’m working on godliness'” (Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb, p. 142).
Tedious Argument
The word apaideutos means unlearned, which is how it is rendered in 2 Timothy 2:23. “But foolish and unlearned questions avoid, knowing that they do gender strifes.” In Prufrock, T.S. Eliot warns us against “tedious arguments.” The apostle Paul was aware of them also. The servant of the Lord must not get dragged into stupid …
Why Some Sermons Are Half-Baked
“Heart fire is true fire. A housewife, who perseveres in the old method of making her own bread, does not want a great blaze at the mouth of the oven. ‘Oh, no!’ she says, ‘I want to get my faggots far back, and get all the heat into the oven itself, and then it becomes …
The Word vs. Special Effects
“While the Renaissance careened after the image, the Reformation became a predominately word-based movement . . . the real religious fervor and intellectual power pulled to the north, so that England, Scandinavia, and Germany became the realm of the word, and the south returned to spectacle” (Arthur Hunt, The Vanishing Word, p. 78).
What Is Marriage?
“A common error among Christians holds that if the sexual act is completed, then the couple are married ‘in God’s sight.’ Many destructive complications occur in contemporary culture because we have adopted the idea that people can be married in God’s sight without being married. It is hard to say where this idea originated, but …