“So this is a doomsday book with a twist: an apocalyptic scenario that can best be avoided not by more government but by less—by government returning to the citizenry the primal responsibilities it’s taken from them in the modern era” (Mark Steyn, America Alone, p. xxix).
Eros and Monogamy: A Puritan Marriage
“This antithesis, if once understood, explains many things in the history of sentiment, and many differences, noticeable to the present day, between the Protestant and the Catholic parts of Europe. It explains why the conversion of courtly love into romantic monogamous love was so largely the work of English, and even of Puritan, poets” (C.S. …
A First Step Toward the Novel
“Daniel Defoe, a working class Puritan, was something of an early gonzo-journalist. Hearing about a man who had just been rescued from a desert island, Defoe decided to make up an account that might appeal to the tabloid readers of his day. The result was Robinson Crusoe (1719). This tale, one of the best adventure …
Not By Knowledge, Lest Any Should Boast
“If an ‘Arminian’ is elect and chosen, then his election is not imperiled through his failure to understand the ninth chapter of Romans. Paul did not say, at the end of the eighth chapter, that nothing can separate us from the love of Christ except for shoddy exegesis. And if a ‘Calvinist’ is reprobate, then …
21 Questions for a Prospective Suitor
A father in my congregation has asked me what sort of questions a father should be asking a young man who wants to court his daughter. It is one thing to affirm that fathers should be active in protecting their daughters, but it is quite another to figure out what sort of specific questions are …
Oh, Never Mind
Guy Waters’ Introduction has three main sections. In the first, he summarizes the doctrine of sola fide. That section was quite good in many respects, actually. I can say this because I affirm, believe, and teach the doctrine of sola fide. The only place I would quibble with Waters here is that I would want …
Palm Sunday 2007
Introduction: This is a message about three crowds. In the grip of individualism, we have too often neglected to heed what the Bible teaches about group behavior, and the results of this neglect are often tragic. The Text: “And a very great multitude spread their garments in the way; others cut down branches from the …
Just Do the Math
“Demographic decline and the unsustainability of the social-democratic state are closely related. In America, politicians upset about the federal deficit like to complain that we’re piling up debts our children and grandchildren will have to pay off. But in Europe the unaffordable entitlements are in even worse shape: there are no kids or grandkids to …
Chestertonian Puritanism, God Bless It
“But there is no understanding the period of the Reformation in England until we have grasped the fact that the quarrel between the Puritans and the Papists was not primarily a quarrel between rigorism and indulgence, and that, in so far as it was, the rigorism was on the Roman side. On many questions, and …
An Abandoned Battlefield
“If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world as Shelley says, then Christians dare not surrender poetry’s influence on the whole mind to the rock musicians or to avant garde nihilists” (Gene Edward Veith, Reading Between the Lines, p. 97).