“Suppose a man marries and he knows that he is going to be unfaithful to his wife — in fact, he already has adulterous plans. But for various reasons, he thinks it expedient to be married, so he does to the church and makes the vows. Now, is he married? Of course he is — …
Not Much Changes
“In its impact on people’s behavior and sense of ‘alienation’ and by its apparent sincerity of feeling, The Stranger came close to becoming the mid-twentieth century equivalent of Goethe’s best-selling The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), which provoked hundreds of suicides all over Europe” (Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge, p. 161).
And You Have to Sign the Card With a Little Stubby Pencil Too
“We do not like the idea of requiring a man to be baptized down in front of the church before we call him a professing Christian — although Jesus commanded such baptism. In lieu of this, we offer a substitute of our devising. Instead of being baptized in front of the church, we say he …
And Democracy is Us Listening to the Voices in our Head
“In other words, no one may rightly judge Demos except Demos. God, insofar as there is one, is synonymous with Community” (Bernard Iddings Bell, Crowd Culture, p. 103).
Teeming With Metaphor
“There are only two established sacraments in the Christian Church, which are baptism and the Lord’s Supper. But the whole world is sacramental, teeming with metaphor. To come to a fuller understanding of this, we should seek to grow in our knowledge of the two formal sacraments that have been placed within the Church. Baptism …
Dull Dogs
“The idea is to treat all the pupils as though they were equally intelligent. The standard of achievement is set to fit the average, which is fair-to-middling low. The result is a mediocrity which frets and frustrates the more able while it flatters the incompetent. This mediocrity is making Americans increasingly a set of dull …
Maybe They Can’t See for the Same Reasons We Couldn’t
“The temptation associated with this is forgetting what it was like not to be able to see. Everything is now so clear to us that anyone who does not immediately assent to what we see in the Word seems either theologically perverse or a chucklehead . . . (2 Tim. 2:24-25). . . [But] to …
Eros and Monogamy: A Puritan Marriage
“This antithesis, if once understood, explains many things in the history of sentiment, and many differences, noticeable to the present day, between the Protestant and the Catholic parts of Europe. It explains why the conversion of courtly love into romantic monogamous love was so largely the work of English, and even of Puritan, poets” (C.S. …
A First Step Toward the Novel
“Daniel Defoe, a working class Puritan, was something of an early gonzo-journalist. Hearing about a man who had just been rescued from a desert island, Defoe decided to make up an account that might appeal to the tabloid readers of his day. The result was Robinson Crusoe (1719). This tale, one of the best adventure …
Not By Knowledge, Lest Any Should Boast
“If an ‘Arminian’ is elect and chosen, then his election is not imperiled through his failure to understand the ninth chapter of Romans. Paul did not say, at the end of the eighth chapter, that nothing can separate us from the love of Christ except for shoddy exegesis. And if a ‘Calvinist’ is reprobate, then …