“A young man, who never really wanted to graduate from high school himself, gets hired as a youth minister. His task is to put together a wild and crazy time down at the church, with perhaps a little inspirational message attached. The driving assumption is that young people today will not tolerate serious instruction and …
What We Declare
“Thus the apostle Paul sets forth what we have called the proclamation, the announcement of what God has done for our reconciliation to Himself. He has refused to impute our sins to us. He has made Christ to be sin for us. This is the ‘gospel’ of which we are heralds. It is the proclamation …
Parasitic Creativity
“The problem of upholding virtue and denouncing vice without appearing priggish, killjoy, bigoted, and narrow-minded has become so acute that intellectuals are now inclined either to deny that there is a distinction between the two or to invert their value. There is no higher word of praise in an art critic’s vocabulary, for example, than …
#NAME?
“Yes, but the Church at large long ago gave up talking about the Lord Jesus Christ, His efficacious death, His conquering cross, and His glorious triumph over death, grave, and sin, as well as over our miserable and filthy little rag-tag band of self-justifying isms — alcoholism, sexaholism, rageaholism, and can’t-be-nice-to-my-wife-a-holism” (Mother Kirk, p. 219).
Riding the Pale Horse
“The Anglican position, on the other hand, by freeing the prince from this strict dependence on scripture and yet making adherence to the prince’s church compulsory, leaves the religious life of every individual in bondage to political power. Whatever they say, even whatever they wish, the puritans are driven to put the Church above the …
Inverted Sentimentality
“The idea that, after an event such as the Great War, an artistic celebration of the world is no longer possible is nonsense, compounded of strangely twisted romanticism and inverted sentimentality . . . But this is simply a pose: supposing an Adorno-like figure had said, ‘After the war, sexual pleasure is no longer possible,’ …
A Useful Job
“If the cross of Jesus Christ does not save drunkards, liars, thieves, cheats, and philanderers, then the ministers of the gospel should go out and get a useful job down at Wendy’s” (Mother Kirk, p. 218).
Absurdly Maligned
“Never, I believe, were men so little understood and so absurdly maligned as the Puritans” (J.C. Ryle, Light From Old Times, p. xiv).
The Merry Puritans
“To [Cardinal Allen], as to all the Roman writers, Protestants were the very reverse of ‘puritans’: they were ‘soft physitions’ . . . against whom he must assert a doctrine admittedly sterner and darker, ‘the behoulding whereof must neades ingender som sorowe and sadnesse of minde’ and even (such is our ‘frailetie’) ‘a certaine bitter …
Legions of Untalented Hacks
“The logic of an arms race came to rule in art: and legions of untalented hacks who came after Miro devoted themselves to thinking about what had never been done before rather than about what they wanted to express” (Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left of It, p. 121).