C.S. Lewis commented once that the present is, historically speaking, a “period.” This may seem too obvious to point out, but there will come a time when what is currently happening will no longer be happening. Several centuries into the future, various schoolchildren will be sweating out the details of our century as they frantically …
Pina Coladas, and Walking in the Rain
The next chapter in Dawkins is called “The ‘Good’ Book and the Changing Moral Zeitgeist,” and it is one of the strangest bits of business I have encountered in some time. The first part of the chapter is dedicated to proving how the Bible exhibits “sheer strangeness” and is “just plain weird” (p. 237). To …
The Metaphorical Bonnet
The exhortation last Lord’s Day spoke to austere fathers. Today I want to address women who tear down their households with their own hands, and with their own tongues. Scripture has a great deal to say to us in our particular stations and callings. Men are addressed one way, and women another. In a community …
The Whole Thing Is Beyond Us
How does anything happen? It takes very little reflection to conclude that the world, and everything in it, is quite remarkable. How can a kernel of wheat germinate in the ground? How is a child knit together in the womb of his mother? How is it that a plant can feed on inanimate nutrients, and …
Just One More Elective Surgery
[Speaking of a radical Islamic political advances in the West] “Designating female genital mutilation (FGM) as an operation that Western doctors may legally perform on Muslim women will probably be first. Some doctors will welcome the extra income for such an easy surgery, just as some of them bank extra income for performing unnecessary abortions …
A PBS Whitewash
“With that, we can see that ‘Islam: Empire of Faith’ [a PBS special] totally covers up the truth about Mohammed—that he was a marauder, stealing other people’s property, having one innocent after another assassinated, ordering several hundred Jewish men beheaded, condemning captive women to spend their entire lives serving him and his followers as sex …
But I Know It When I See It
“Life and art are too complex to lay down legalistic rules. But that does not mean that there are no norms. Although one cannot define the wrong kind of seductiveness or the right kind of prettiness and the attractiveness of a woman by the length of her skirt or the depth of the décolleté, nevertheless …
Wise and Otherwise
The Bayly brothers are doing good work fighting the encroachments of soft feminism in PCA circles, as you will discover if you check out their blog from time to time. As you should. My particular line of thought here takes off from something they have mentioned there, which is the idea (current in the PCA) …
Pious Mutilation
“Islam’s widespread practice of amputating the clitoris and sometimes part or even all of the vulva from the genitalia of Muslim women, affirmed in a hadith by Mohammed himself, most like also traces back to the founder’s deliberate abuse of sex to lure pagan males into his cult” (Don Richardson, Secrets of the Koran, p. …
Gearing Up for Mother’s Day
One of our cultural customs honors our mothers once a year on Mother’s Day. There is no divine sanction for the particular day chosen, but the theme of the observance is required in the Ten Commandments, and Paul tells us that this is the first commandment with a promise—that your life may be long in …