“The law requires not only that we should do thus and thus but that we should do it with ‘a free, a willing, a lusty, and a louing hart’. Its beginning and end is that we should love God and our neighbours. It demands of us not only acts but new motives. This is what …
Because God is Not Mocked
“As anyone who has seen a number of films in the horror-slasher genre could attest, there is nothing surprising about this morality at all. The message of slasher films is very simple: you screw, you die . . . the plot of every horror story is essentially the same. If you violate sexual morals, you …
The Deeper Issue
“When the standards of Christian leadership are all feminine, the individuals most obviously qualified to be Christian leaders will be women. And so this poses a dilemma — why should we exclude women from leadership when they are so obviously qualified for what we call leadership? At that point we divide, with some calling for …
The Puritan Heart Set Free
“In theological language, no man can be saved by works. The whole purpose of the ‘gospel’, for Tyndale, is to deliver us from morality. Thus, paradoxically, the ‘puritan’ of modern imagination — the cold, gloomy heart, doing as duty what happier and richer souls do without thinking of it — is precisely the enemy which …
Get a Bit and Bridle on Your Gifts
“Watch your natural gifts and tendencies and idiosyncrasies. Watch them. What I mean is that they will tend to run away with you. It can all be summed up in a phrase — watch your strength. Not so much your weaknesses: it is your strength you have to watch, the things at which you excel, …
And They Think That We Have a Thing About Sex
“Ripley then takes off her clothes, and as soon as she does so the Alien reappears. Here we have the truncated causality of the horror genre. As in The Bacchae, The Blob, Blood Feast, Slumber Party Massacre, and countless other examples, as soon as an attractive young woman removes any article of clothing a monster …
Souls of Rejected Children
“The womb was scraped clean, but the fetus instead of disappearing simply changed its place of residence. Once it was prevented from growing in her womb, it started growing in her mind, a troubled conscience that could not be repressed . . . The monsters that haunt . . . are the souls of the …
The Spirit of the Age Stretched Across the Room
“The left-wing anti-Calvinists were the Unitarians, who captured Harvard in 1805. The right-wing anti-Calvinists were the revivalists, typified by leaders such as Charles Finney, who were greatly swelled with a humanistic, democratic spirit which they all thought was the Holy Ghost” (Mother Kirk, pp. 202-203).
Puritan Poetic Glory
“Historians whose sympathies are Roman attribute the catastrophe to the Reformation. But if the cause lies in that quarter at all it must be sought in some peculiarity of the Scotch Reformation; for in England the old religion had no such poetical glories to show and the new had many” (C.S. Lewis, English Literature in …
The Moral Conscience Has a Chainsaw
“What they got—and by extension what the nation that supported them got—was something that completely surpassed their intentions, but a something which nonetheless substantiated the moral law in a way they could not have foreseen and which they probably would still not admit. To recapitulate the past forty years of film history, which was in …