“Talking to a young woman’s father is not the same thing as staking a claim, or establishing dibbies” (Her Hand in Marriage, p.63).
Romantic Claptrap
“In modern society the main cause of drug addiction, apart from the fact that many people have nothing to live for, is a literary tradition of romantic claptrap, started by Coleridge and DiQuincey, and continued without serious interruption ever since” (Dalrymple, Romancing Opiates, p. 61).
Why Addiction Isn’t Really
“In other words, the establishment of an addiction requires a certain discipline or determination. It is not something that creeps up on your unnoticed or unannounced or all unawares. As a moment’s reflection would suggest to anyone not blinded by self-interest, this fact has important and profound implications for the very concept of treatment, which …
Another Part of the Tangle
“When a little girl is not getting the attention from her father that she needs, she remains hungry for male attention and she will seek it elsewhere. Now when a little girl does this with someone she does not know, she is usually a pain in the neck. But what happens when this young girl, …
The Chicken and Egg
“A man who says that he is easily led . . . never uses this characteristic to explain his good deeds, good characteristics, or positive achievements. A man never claims to have been easily led to higher mathematics, the subjunctives of foreign languages, or unpaid work among the poor. People are influenced by the people …
The Model to Copy
“The pillars of Donne’s biblical, Protestant poetics are: that the scriptures are the most eloquent books in the world, that God is a witty and also ‘a figurative, a metaphoricall God,’and that the religious lyric poet should endeavor to ‘write after . . . [his] Copie.'” (Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, p.282).
Son of a Gun. Whattaya Know?
“Unfortunately, it is not only those who take heroin who are blinded by illusions, but almost the entire population, including—or especially—the experts. Every problem in contemporary society calls forth its equal and supposedly opposite bureaucracy. The ostensible purpose of the bureaucracy is to solve that problem. But the bureaucracy quickly develops a survival instinct and …
Brick House
[Concerning Gen. 29:17] “The other concern might come from more conservative and prudish Christians, who are embarrassed that the Bible records the fact that Rachel was built like a brick house. ‘That’s not very . . . well, biblical.’ But actually the Bible sets the standard of what is biblical and what is not. The …
Addiction Is Behavior
“But medical consequences, however terrible, do not make a disease. Many mountaineers break their legs or get frostbite, but mountaineering is not a disease . . . to conceive of opiate addiction as a disease seems, after my experience with thousands of drug addicts, to me to miss the fundamental point about it: that it …
Or Soteriology Perhaps?
“The courting relationship should be handled carefully by Christians because it is a volatile sexual relationship. The fact that it is unconsummated does not keep it from being sexual. When a young many approaches a girl’s father, there is no sense anyone pretending that something platonic or spiritual is happening. ‘Mr. Smith, may I have …