Whenever believers confront unbelieving cultures, the perennial question arises — what can and cannot be taken from them and used by us in the advancement of the kingdom? One of the most enduring illustrations of what to do here is the image given by one of the early church fathers, which is that of plundering …
More Red Statey Extremism
Nick Gier, one of our Intolerista honchos, had a letter in our local paper tonight. This is a letter which I would like to gloss for you as a public service. His letter is in bold, my comments are interspersed. I was shocked to learn that the Daily News has given Ed Iverson, someone closely …
Hypocrisy on Stilts
The problem of Pharisaism is not solved by dropping the phylactery that is “wider than yours” and picking up the Bible that is “more underlined than yours.” You cannot solve spiritual problems of the heart simply by rearranging the furniture. We are born casting sidelong glances, and the solution to this is repentance, not really …
Hollow As A Jug
I am over in Portland for the presbytery meeting of the CREC, at which we have been doing lots of cool presbyterial stuff. Anyhow, I posted what I did this morning on affected authenticity, and went off to presbytery. When I got back this evening there was a small mountain of comments, etc., which I …
Backing and Filling, Waffling and Noodling
Those who are interested can find a funny instance of academic hypocrisy here. Nick Gier is one of our intoleristas, and has been trying to rally forces against us by banging the plagiarism drum until the stick breaks. He is quiet for a little bit until he finds another stick, and then he starts up …
Affected Authenticity
When we talk about the way we dress, we often forget that we are speaking about language. That is, we use the full force of language to get what we want to get, and when called on it, we “plead the dictionary,” to use my earlier example. Suppose a young rebel in your church were …
Little Geneva
It turns out that the folks at Little Geneva don’t like the fact that I tell redneck jokes. And as a result of me acquiring this information, here are a couple more! What do a tornado and a redneck divorce have in common? I dunno, what? In both cases, somebody loses a mobile home! And …
Learning to Detest Hypocrisy
During a portion of the sermon this last Sunday, I spent a little bit of time on the problem of lowlife authenticity. After the message I had a good conversation with a good friend over my professed bafflement over what causes the attraction to this lowlife ethos. He made the point that the cause of …
Velveeta Evidence
The president of the University of Idaho has, in a maladroit attempt to avoid controversy, created a controversy. He put out a statement the other day that in the scientific departments of the university, the teaching of Intelligent Design was verboten-idea-kind-of-thing. Science is based on evidence, he said, and then issued a decree from on …
More on Race
Jonah Goldberg over at NRO wants to talk about Bill Bennett again, which is fine. We were all doing well with one of our periodic squabbles over race when the president interrupted with his latest Supreme Court nominee. So back to the squabble. In my previous post on this, I noted that blacks were many …