The Lord’s brother warned us about the problem of incongruity in speech. With the same tongue we praise God, in a service of worship, and we also curse those who are made in God’s likeness — whether in traffic, or in family irritations, or in self-righteousness censure. Gossip during the week is inconsistent with what …
The Chattering Classes
[Speaking of Carlyle] “The danger, as he saw it, was in the distraction: ordinary men and women turned to ‘art,’ and the worship of art, only when they had nothing more important to do or to think about. And idle humans – bored humans – were not whole humans. They were shells, chattering away to …
MLD
“And as this generation of children has grown up in an environment of institutionalized excuses, it is supremely ill-equipped for maturity. Not surprisingly, many adults are now insisting on bringing their baggage — in the form of notes from their doctor — along with them. We now have Adult Attention Deficit Syndrome. And why not? …
Victims and Justice
In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, when Edmund betrayed his sisters and brother, he did so because he felt that he was the victim. This is how the world of rationalization, revenge, and treachery work. And this, of course, has a profound effect on perceptions of justice. In his book The Scapegoat, Rene …
The Greasy Pole of Ambition
“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11) Growing Dominion, Part 73 “He that is despised, and hath a servant, is better than he that honoureth himself, and lacketh bread” (Prov. 12:9) A man can have wealth and look like he has it. He can have it, and look like he …
Argument Weak, Shout Here
“They [literary critics] had become an interest group battling for a share of influence, seeking to preserve their sense of self-importance by bullying an increasingly disgusted public into extending their mandate for another decade or two. The more they were called to account, the louder did they howl; the more they were asked to explain …
Teaching Disadilities
“If it is our schools which are ‘teaching disabled,’ the symptoms of this lack would still be visible primarily in the students and not necessarily in the schools or teachers. When a doctor is incompetent, it is the patient who dies” (The Paideia of God, p. 17).
Blowing Bubbles At the Moon
The thoughts of man are vain. The thoughts of man are carried around in a bone case, five or six feet above a couple of ground pounders (with ten pink toes splayed on the ends of them) that pack those thoughts around from place to place. In order to keep those thoughts going, a man …
The World to Come
The supremacy of Christ over the angels continues as the theme in the early portion of Hebrews, but with an important development in the text. Christ is not only supreme over the angels, He holds this position now as the Incarnate One — the God/man. For He has not put the world to come, of …
Entertained By Decadence
“After that all was chaos, and it was no longer possible to discover just which critics were making the most definitive statements about which Voluptuous Grotesqueries. The incessant gibberish had become one long rumble in the night, and Major Critics bobbed like corks in a sea of splendid horror.” [Bryan F. Griffin, Panic Among the …