“By a puritan the Elizabethans meant one who wished to abolish episcopacy and remodel the Church of England on the lines which Calvin had laid down for Geneva. They puritan party were not separatists or (in the modern sense) dissenters . . . There were therefore degrees of puritanism and it is difficult to draw …
Tell Us What You Really Think, Martyn
“Lastly, and only lastly, Homiletics. This to me is almost an abomination. There are books bearing such titles as The Craft of Sermon Construction, and The Craft of Sermon Illustration. That is, to me, prostitution. Homiletics just comes in, but no more. What about preaching as such, the act of preaching of which I have …
Sexually Transmitted Dracula
“For instance, Coppola has Van Helsing mention the word syphilis, which is the book’s ultimate taboo, but the whole point of Dracula as monster is that neither Stoker nor Harker can mention syphilis. The monster is, in effect, the sign that neither Stoker nor Harker can bring themselves to face the true cause of their …
A Grand Mystery
“In short, we should be fully convinced in our own minds concerning those conditions in our own families which would cause us voluntarily to step down, and those conditions in the life and household of another that would justify a fight at presbytery. Whatever we understand Paul to be saying, our standards of application should …
Those Pesky Logical Conclusions
“In other words, horror is a kind of Enlightenment revisionism. Voltaire hoped for a society where religion and morals were abolished but where shopkeepers would still be honest. Sade showed the naiveté of that vision by carrying the premises upon which it was based to their logical conclusion” (E. Michael Jones, Monsters from the Id, …
Blinded Me With Science
“The parallels between Justine [by de Sade] and Frankenstein become obvious at this point. Sexual desire using science as a cover turns human beings into objects by promoting the notion that morals are either ‘unscientific’ or are a mere epiphenomenon of the mechanism as yet not understood ” (E. Michael Jones, Monsters from the Id, …
Moral Dyslexia
“Mary Shelley, at this point in our narrative, did not understand all this, but by the time she had finished writing Frankenstein she did not see things Shelley’s way, either. She had by that time experienced the sadistic consequences of her sexual profligacy. Frankenstein was her attempt to make sense out of the conflict between …
Oceans of Beer
“Thus a man who slept with twenty women before his conversion, but was enough of a jerk not to marry any of them, is thought to be qualified for eldership after his conversion, but a man who married one woman and was divorced from her before his conversion is thought to be automatically disqualified. This …
Porn As Revolution
“The revolutionaries simply put to their own use the libido that Versailles had unleashed. Sade, who more explicitly than any other in France described and reveled in the link between pornography and political revolution, was not an aberration of eighteenth-century French culture, but the culmination of the French predilection for pornography” (E. Michael Jones, Monsters …
Not Counting Rocks
“These passages describe required personal attributes and character — they are not a mechanical checklist. Paul and Peter require us to find a certain kind of man. This is important for many reasons, but early among them is that the elders are responsible to replenish their own ranks, and in order to find a certain …