“Ritual sex and human sacrifice are stolen moments of power over, and temporary relief from submission to. They are, we know by hindsight, a mimicry of divinity, but pagan man did not know that. He experienced it as power sharing, negotiating with the gods. To placate a god by burning his children on its altars …
Slip Out the Back
“At the very least, this system [of recreational dating] is as much a preparation for divorce as it is for marriage. Whenever the other person starts to wear a little thin, you just slip out the back, Jack” (Her Hand in Marriage, p. 11).
The Touchstone of Protestant Poetics
“The reasons for singling out David the Psalmist as the primary model for Christian poets no doubt include the very great spiritual significance and artistic worth ascribed to the Psalms in contemporary commentary, as well as their use for centuries in Christian liturgy. But in addition, the Psalms were seen to raise with special force …
The Beautiful Character
“We have lost our sense of the holiness of beauty . . . when exterior beauty is in harmony with a character’s interior beauty, then the sign value of the tale of the character is greatly enhanced” (Michael D. O’Brian, A Landscape With Dragons, p. 35).
Just and General
“Generalizations are legitimate if they honestly describe an overall pattern. Generalizations are consequently not refuted through particular and individual counter examples. Honest Pharisees lived at the time of Christ, and they were not an embarrassment to Christ’s scathing denunciations of their religious sect as a whole. Indeed one indication of a Pharisee’s honesty would be …
Keeping Dragons Dragony
“The imagination fed on truth knows that the serpent is a symbol of hatred and deceit, of evil knowledge and power without conscience . . . I want [my children] to read plenty of stories in which there are dragons that act like dragons and meet a dragon’s end” (Michael D. O’Brian, A Landscape With …
Catechized by Fairy Tales
“Good magic and bad magic in truthful stories correspond to true religion and false religion in our real world . . . True religion is about surrender, while false religion is about control” (Michael D. O’Brian, A Landscape With Dragons, p. 29).
Shriveling the Inner Man
“We must consider each situation in its own right to get some sense of who or what is responsible for the boredom and what can be done to relieve it. We have seen many influences in our culture and in the individual choices that people make in response to their circumstances that might lead to …
Corruption and Stewardship
“Rarely will followers of Christ set overt corruption as their goal; rather, they want to be conservative, consolidate gains, learn fiscal realism, and be ‘good stewards.’ Of course, nothing is wrong with good stewardship — other than the fact that is a phrase which frequently stands in for bad stewardship” (For Kirk and Covenant, p. …
Do We Think That They Think That We Are Influenced by What They Show Us?
“If their techniques for influencing us were not successful, I doubt they would spend millions of dollars for a thirty-second commercial during the Super Bowl or the Academy Awards” (Richard Winter, Still Bored in a Culture of Entertainment, p. 85).