Ezra Nehemiah 10

Introduction: Times of reformation are not times when sin goes away, when no recurring temptations present themselves. Rather, history reveals periods of reformation as those times when the sin was dealt with as it should have been, often at great cost. Reformation is not like a figure skater gliding smoothly across the ice; it is …

Odd Bedfellows

After I posted DeeplyGrieved.com (a few posts down), my wife mentioned to me another important “indicator that something is screwy” that I had missed. Once someone has enlisted in what I call “the fellowship of the grievance” (FOG) all other differences with other members of that fellowship fade into the background. Adversaries become cobelligerents, and …

Humor Is Resistance

Malcolm Muggeridge, who knew his totalitarians (and the liberals who loved them) once said, “To laugh is to criticize . . . Humour, that is to say, is a kind of resistance movement, which is sometimes indulgently tolerated, sometimes barely tolerated, and sometimes not tolerated at all.” George Orwell, who also knew something about the …

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 …

Still A Deadly Mistake

In September of 2004, N.T. Wright gave an address for a symposium on “Men, Women and the Church.” That talk can be found here. The conference was apparently sponsored by an organization (CBE) dedicated to the egalitarian position on women ministering in the Church, and Wright (who supports the ordination of women) was there to …

The Apologetic for Bad Art

“The first thing we must do is get the smoke out of our eyes. Which is to say that we must start afresh, and concede publicly what most earnest men and women have always conceded privately, that the ancient apology for bad art-“the work is shoddy and disjointed because The Times are shoddy and disjointed”-is …