The second chapter of Hitchens’ book is entitled “Religion Kills.” Well, in this world of hardscrabble Darwinism, nature red in tooth and claw, what doesn’t? Religion kills, but so does cancer, old age, hunting accidents, radiation from the sun, other predatory species, too much mayonnaise, and the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber. Actually, we need …
Lo, the Bombasticator Cometh
Comes now Christopher Hitchens in his new book, God is Not Great, and he thwacketh us believers upon the mazzard. The book promises to be an engaging read; Hitchens writes fluidly and well, and he knows how to go over the top rhetorically, but not by too much. More on this shortly. His rationalism is …
Crisis of Faith
Christians still have to get used to the idea that non-believers are the establishment. And once they are accustomed to that notion, they have to come to realize that it is at bottom good news. In the last century, when the orthodox Christian establishment capitulated to the incoming waves of modernism, liberalism, Darwinism, and collectivism, …
B Follows A
“As the bumper sticker says, if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns. Likewise, if (as Europe has done) you marginalize religion, only the marginalized will have religion. That’s why France’s impoverished Muslim ghettos display more cultural confidence than the wealthiest enclaves of the capital” (Mark Steyn, America Alone, p. 47).
And Guess Where We Are
“I must also leave you to analyze the cultural decline of Western art and literature. In the cycle of a great civilization, the artist begins as a priest and ends as a clown or buffoon” (Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom, p. 18).
Cooking and Eating
“Of course we know that Word and sacrament go together. But how do they go together? In the minds of many believers, the two go together like ham and eggs, two disparate but complementary elements combining in a pleasing way. But perhaps they go together in another way entirely — one suggestion is that they …
Head and Heart
“We all put off the cause of our divisions from ourselves. Few would give St. James’s answer: ‘They are from hence, even from our lusts.’ There would not be such evil distillations from the head if it were not for the malignant vapors that arise from the stomach. Curing the heart will sooner cure the …
Deemphasis or Denial
I said a few days ago that I was going to say something about why I accept N.T. Wright’s assertion that he holds to penal substitution. This will be brief, and may not be adequate for those with questions, but here it is. It is a methodological issue. I am uncomfortable with assertions of what …
Judas the Christian
In his treatment of my chapter on whether or not Judas was a Christian, Greenbaggins does a good job catching the distinctions I was seeking to make. He hears my qualifications, and is willing to believe them. He says that he has no real problem with the chapter, and had just a few quibble/questions. One …
Living Like a Trinitarian
I recently told a class of tenth-graders that what our culture needed was a return to trinitarian bubble-gum commercials. They were a little nonplussed, and so I hastened to explain. Individuals with one set of ultimate commitments have the capacity to live in alien soil, that is, a culture with a different set of commitments. …