The Poems of Rowan Williams (Eerdmans, 2002, 111 pp. Rowan Williams is the current Archbishop of Canterbury. This is the second book of his I have read, and the first that I have finished. The first book, his treatment of the heretic Arius, was scholarly and well-written, but it lost me somewhere and I ditched. …
The Mantle of Momentum
I have said in this space before that I do not have a great deal of faith in polls. I don’t think we have the ability to interview 250 Americans, render general by induction, and determine what candidate 250 million Americans actually favor. But another observation needs to be linked to this. It doesn’t matter …
Dogpile Dan
Despite the fact that I remain above the fray, and the fact that I don’t know who I am going to vote for, the current set-up has its inspiring moments. The current inspiration is the nation-wide journalistic dogpile with Dan Rather on the bottom of it.
Wishing I Could Vote for Bush
There are quite a few reasons, actually. But none of them push me over the line. After eight years of Clinton, it has been comparatively pleasant to have a government staffed with grown-ups. Add to that the fact that Jean-Francois Kerry is, in countless ways, insufferable. N’est pas? Couple this with the fact that Bush …
Showboat
One recent political surprise is the fact that the swift boat controversy has actually become a controversy. Normally this kind of thing just gets buried. I don’t know if this issue has feet because of Internet coverage, because of Fox News, or because there are some Democrats who don’t really want a Kerry win to …
Strange Alliances Forming on Conestoga
Dr. Nick Gier, local intolerista agitator, and author of God, Reason, and the Evangelicals: The Case Against Evangelical Rationalism was recently seen on Conestoga St. in Moscow, looking to link up with Charles Nolan, publisher of J.C. Ryle’s great work entitled Holiness. Subsequent events indicated that they did in fact find each other. Charles Nolan …
Refuse the Benefits First
Another flap has broken out at the University of North Carolina, where a Christian student organization was denied status as a student organization because they declined to sign a statement that said non-Christians were welcome to be members and officers in the organization. Of course, this has caused something of a hissy fit on the …
Is Skulk a Great Word or What?
The word skulk just captures it, you know? For those who read this blog from other parts of the great wide world, I hope the posts on our local intoleristas have not been too boring. But it should really not be boring for anyone, offering, as it does, a window that gives us a view …
Words on a Page
One of the perennial frustrations in contemporary political discourse is caused by the linguistic dishonesty of the human heart. For example, the Constitution says certain very specific things about what can and cannot be done, and our current crop of solons blithely disregard such “words on a page” in order to do whatever it is …
Grease on the Nose
The only thing that is worse than pathetic behavior is pathetic behavior supplemented with pathetic excuses. Those who would violate the pastoral/church member relation (on a massive scale) in order to get material for their partisan mud-gobbing are pathetic. Those who would try to justify such a thing by pointing to what they thought they …