What is superstition? In our secular age, it is common to define it as the religious practices of someone else, practices that you don’t believe in. But this is too easy. Superstition should be best understood as any devoted spiritual practice that is mindlessly conducted and pursued, and yet tenaciously practiced. False faith would be …
Liberal Arts Education in a Recession
Here a few thoughts for those of you who have been considering New St. Andrews College, but who have also been wondering about the uncertainties created by the economic moon crater we are now living in. Here are just a few additional considerations to put in the hopper. 1. This problem has revealed, as few …
The Creed and the Pledge
Many thanks for the good discussion on the previous post. Obviously more is needed. In fact, when I consider the shape we’re in, more is desperately needed. I say the Apostles’ Creed far more often than I say the Pledge. And when I say the Pledge of Allegiance, as noted already, it is not without …
Battlefields and Museums
The real constitution of every nation is located in the cultural assumptions of the people of that nation, and those cultural assumptions are themselves fixed by the object of their worship. The God (or gods) you worship shape and direct everything. The God you worship may cause you to write certain things down (in your …
Basilica
It gives me a great deal of pleasure to recommend Basilica to you — a journal of mere Christendom. This promises to be a great recource for those who want to learn about the Reformers as they were in historic 3-D. Make sure you browse in the nooks and crannies.
Why Does Cavanaugh Believe Jeshurun?
I enjoyed and benefitted from William Cavanaugh’s Theopolitical Imagination, and am now working through his Being Consumed. The subtitle of this second book is “Economics and Christian Desire,” and I believe I really need to post a few installments on it. In my view, Cavanaugh is playing into the new Constantinian error and this is …
Patriotism With Pom Poms
Yesterday we had a stimulating discussion at the NSA graduate forum, and I was going to take a moment here to let some of my afterthoughts spill over. We were discussing whether the left wing/right wing distinction is inherently an idolatrous one. Anyone who has followed this blog for very long knows that there is …
Constantine’s Real Mistake
Just a quick note on Christ and Christendom, and some of our current political snarls. In my political writing, I have made no secret of my yearning for a Christendom 2.0. This means that I believe the conversion of Constantine was a decided improvement over what had been going on before. This does not mean …
The Bronzed Nerve
Chapter Five is “Taking America Back for God,” and Boyd begins by describing a worship service that he attended around the time of the First Gulf War, one that sounds every bit as appalling as Boyd describes. “The video closed with a scene of a silhouette of three crosses on a hill with an American …
Denying the Cat
The Doors of the Sea is a small book, divided into two chapters — “Universal Harmony” and “Divine Victory.” Each chapter is divided into sections, and I want to interact with the book section by section. In this book, David Bentley Hart grapples with the Asian tsunami and the problem of natural evil. I don’t …