“Authors, restrained by our laws against obscenity—rather silly laws, it may be—from using half a dozen monosyllables, felt as if they were martyrs of science, like Galileo. To the objection ‘This is obscene’ or “This is depraved’, or even to the more critically relevant objection ‘This is uninteresting’, the reply ‘This occurs in real life’ …
Balsa Wood Soaked in Lighter Fluid
“Many Christians are praying for revival, but we need to careful how we pray. The Church today is a lightweight operation, like a stack of balsa wood, soaked in lighter fluid. The consuming fire of the Holy Spirit would therefore not burn for long and would not leave much. We must pray for a doctrinal …
Uptight Grammarians, Out With Whom We Do Not Wish to Hang
“I am thinking of what I call Style-mongers. On taking up a book, these people concentrate on what they call its ‘style’ or its ‘English’. They judge this neither by its sound nor by its power to communicate but by its conformity to certain arbitrary rules. Their reading is a perpetual witch hunt for Americanisms, …
No Sense Blaming the Meat
“The only way the unbelieving world can be constrained in its external actions, in a way contrary to that unregenerate nature, is when the Church is salty. Christ taught that His followers were the salt of the earth — applied to an ungodly society in the same way salt was applied to perishable meat as …
It All Comes Down to the Point
“Every art is itself and not some other art. Every general principle we reach must, therefore, have a peculiar mode of application to each of the arts” (C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, p. 28).
Conservative Values
“No thoughtful Christian can consider the state of our culture today without considerable grief. The lawless are in power, the innocent suffer, the gullible believe, the taxable pay, the sages are befuddled, and everything gets progressively worse. One political party wants to drive us toward the cliff at seventy miles an hour, and the loyal …
The Casual Imperative
“Casualness is proper at times, but the trouble is we have made it a fetish. Whether shopping or going to school or even to church, we take too literally the invitation of the second-class hotel, ‘Come as you are.’ And the sloppier we come, the sloppier we tend to act. A slouch in the body …
No Problem Passages
“By the grace of the Lord, we must resolve to be faithful to every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. From Genesis to Revelation, we must not be embarrassed by any passage of Scripture, and once we have submissively ascertained its meaning through careful and patient grammatical, historical and typological, we must seek …
Inescapable Artistic Standards
“Until the artistic impulse is eradicated more thoroughly from human life than has so far been done, even by the best efforts of the metallic civilization of our day, we cannot get rid of the categories of good and bad or high and low in the field of art” (J. Gresham Machen, as quoted in …
Root and Fruit
“We must affirm then that at the deepest level there can be no mature Christian character which despises culture, any more than there can be a truly Christian culture which is not rooted in character” (Richard Taylor, A Return to Christian Culture, p. 17).