“In order to teach, the Church must first be taught. Writers must be readers. ‘A fool hath no delight in understanding, but that his heart may discover itself’ (Prov. 18:2). The Church will never have a shortage of people who want to ‘say a few words.’ But mere talk, or writing, or publishing, is worthless. …
Modified Burke
“In the field of aesthetics, all that is necessary for kitsch to triumph is for men to fail to discriminate” (Theodore Dalrymple, In Praise of Prejudice, p. 75).
A Special Form of Naivete
“One convention has been replaced by another. When I attended a bourgeois bohemian funeral in Paris recently, it was I who stood out in my dark suit and tie—so provincial, so conventional! Everyone else looked as if he or she had just popped into the cemetery after a bit of shopping in the local grocery …
Taking the Show on the Road
“The principle here is that you cannot export what you do not have, and, if you try, you will only wind up exporting what you do have. Whenever Pharisees go on a mission, the result is Pharisaism overseas. When scriptural ignorance goes on a crusade, the result is crusading ignorance. The applications to our situation …
The Funniest Convention
“But the kind of originality that everyone shares is not the kind of originality that modern romantics require in order to feel fully individuated in mass society. What they need is original originality, or meta-originality, as it were. This sets up the equivalent of an arms race, with more and more extravagant gestures required to …
Concupisco Ergo Sum
“The popularity of the Cartesian method is not the consequence of a desire to remove metaphysical doubt, and find certainty, but precisely the opposite: to cast doubt on everything, and thereby increase the scope of personal license, by destroying in advance any philosophical basis for the limitation of our own appetites. The radical skeptic, nowadays …
And Burn All Their Houses
“If someone says that no ethical standards are fixed, and so we ought not to apply our standards to anybody else, we now know what to ask. What does the good gentleman mean, “we ought not”? If ethical standards are not fixed, then the conclusion could just as easily be that we ought to apply …
More Postmodern Hooey
“I part company with [postmodern] writers, when they reject the notion of a normative human nature or deny that we can know about such a nature . . . The Enlightenment did not invent the concept of a universal human nature or the notion of a universal moral law, nor did Immanuel Kant or St. …
Warping the Men
“The sex carnival that is college life today is also doing great damage to our sons’ characters, deforming their attitudes toward the opposite sex. I am witnessing a perceptible dissolution of manly virtue in the young men I teach” (Vigen Guroian, Rallying the Really Human Things, p. 148).
Calvinism and Evangelism
“The principal problem here is not the fact that evangelicals adopted Calvinism and consequently lost their zeal for evangelism, but rather that postmillennial Calvinists abandoned their postmillennialism and consequently lost their conviction that the gospel would go forth into the world, conquering and to conquer” (Mother Kirk, p. 249).