One of the great political temptations that moderns face is the temptation of the “grand scale.” When the state aspires to deity, the state needs to generate the requisite awe in those who participate in the process. One of the ways of doing this is to proclaim that the future of the planet is at …
Communicant and Excommunicant
You are communicant members of the body of Christ. That means that one of the great privileges of grace you have been given is that of participating, of communing, at this Table. When we discipline someone, as we have done this morning, this is the center of what they are being excluded from. The prefix …
Go Check out the Upgrade
I am happy to announce that Nancy’s blog has a new look — check it out here. And joining her in posting will be my daughter-in-law Heather Wilson, and my two daughters, Bekah Merkle and Rachel Jankovic. Go, fight, win.
A lot of pastors could do worse than to insert this little number in a service somewhere as “special music.” HT: Peter Scholtens
Important Correction
A few days ago I ran this photo below. And as much as I would like to run the “false but true” defense that Dan Rather has wielded so effectively in the past, it appears that the photo is actually from a 1994 Dutch indie film entitled The Stone. The actress in the photo is …
NSA in The New York Times Magazine
We got a nice note from Molly Worthen, who wrote an article on NSA for The New York Times Magazine. That article is available here. In her note she comments, fairly enough, that the article is critical in places, but that she is hopeful that the article does indicate her interest in and admiration for …
John Mark
As we give ourselves to the study of this Gospel, let us prepare our hearts to hear the words as though they were spoken just yesterday. Just as this Gospel begins with the preparations of John the Baptist; so let us ask God to prepare our hearts in a similar way. Part of this preparation …
The Puritan Defense of Poesy
“The defence of poetry will not be rightly understood unless we keep two facts carefully in mind. In the first place, it is a defence not of poetry as against prose but of fiction as against fact. The word poetry often covered all imaginative writing whether in prose or verse, and even those critics who …
Unappreciated Heroism
“It was in Africa that I first discovered that bourgeois virtues are not only desirable but often heroic” (Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left of It, p. 25).
Oysters Whistle Out of Tune
“Oysters always whistle out of tune, and we should not be surprised when men cannot accomplish their own salvation. We should not marvel that men cannot restore and reform the Church . . . With our indistinct mutterings, we have ‘preached’ our way into a culture that we deserve. Because we are the problem, we …