Theology That Bites Back
Introduction: In a recent article at First Things, in a piece entitled The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism, Aaron Renn does an admirable job hunting for the black box that will explain for us what happened ...
Introduction: It is certainly tempting to simply make the case by saying that a fake pandemic should have fake papers to accompany it, but that would be too easy, far too glib. I already have severe critics who struggle with their tendency to be censorious, and that would frankly not help. So I won’t start …
Introduction: I have previously used this space to commend a newsletter called The Masculinist, written and distributed by Aaron Renn. He provides a lot of trenchant analysis of the sort that you won’t find among the approved but gelded evangelicals, and hence it has a lot more explanatory power than what you usually get. If …
Introduction: Sometime last week, Kevin DeYoung outraged the already outraged by suggesting that it is time for faithful believers to think about a new culture wars strategy. Given that he ...
Flags Out Front: This brief reply has to do with the novel Flags Out Front. What an excellent concept for a novel. I have proclaimed for years that the US flag has no authority over the Christian flag to fly above it, let alone fly in the sanctuary of the Lord, as these flags represent …
I will not have a lot to say about this next chapter of The Benedict Option, the chapter on “Eros and the New Christian Counterculture.” I do have some cavils here and there about how much monastics have to teach us about human sexuality, but in the main this is a really solid chapter. Dreher …
The next chapter of The Benedict Option is entitled “Preparing for Hard Labor.” It is an informative chapter, and quite solid in diagnosing what we are currently up against. In this chapter, Dreher describes the stranglehold that advocates of the new order have managed to get on the old economy. He begins by noting that …
Out of the Ashes really is a marvelous book, and Anthony Esolen is a baller. He tackles the same problem that Rod Dreher is addressing in The Benedict Option—which is the apostasy and resultant deterioration of a formerly Christian culture—but he does it with a lot more verve. In fact, any more verve and it …
I begin by noting something by Samuel Johnson in The Vanity of Human Wishes, a little something for us to keep in reserve. How small of all that human hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or cure. In this next chapter, Rod Dreher says many good and pertinent things, but these …
The second chapter of Dreher’s The Benedict Option is really quite good overall. I found myself agreeing with much of it, and agreeing also with the various qualifications Dreher made as he went along. What he does in this chapter is give a brief intellectual history of the West’s apostasy, and in the main, he …
