“From the Marxist literary critic Frederic Jameson to the poststructuralist philosopher Michel Foucault, from Jacques Derrida to the legions of lesser-known feminist ‘theorizers,’ devotees of ‘cultural studies,’ and all-purpose academic radicals, you’ll find slightly different arrangements of the same old song: All cultural and intellectual life is ‘really’ a coefficient of power relations. This is …
Why the Church Is Following Pop Culture’s Script
“This is why the dearth of serious, sustained biblical preaching in the Church today is a serious matter. When the Church loses the Word of God it loses the very means by which God does his work. In its absence, therefore, a script is being written, however unwittingly, for the Church’s undoing, not in one …
Partial Reforms
“Those who would bring about a controlled reform from the outside have a dicey problem. They want to use private sector pressure to make the government schools straighten up and fly right, but they don’t want this privatization to get completely out of hand. Once parents enjoy a real taste of educational freedom, the result …
And Just In Time Too
“Another law professor, the radical feminist Catharine MacKinnon, summed up a different aspect of the current situation when she declared that feminism’s ‘critique of the objective standpoint as male is a critique of science as a specifically male approach to knowledge. With it re reject male criteria for verification'” (Tenured Radicals, p. xii).
Not a Decorative Flourish
“The Christian faith is not a condiment to be used to flavor the neutral substance of secular knowledge. Paul tells ust hat every thought is to be made captive to Christ (2 Cor. 10: 1-4). Christ says that anyone who does not gather with Him is scattering (Matt. 12:30). The Christian faith does very poorly …
More of a Mirror Than We Would Like to Admit
“Movies are fantasies, but a nation’s fantasies are also statements about itself.” [E. Christian Kopff, The Devil Knows Latin (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 1999), p. 223]
Untethered Virtue and Other Spooky Thoughts
“Respect for rationality and the rights of the individual; a commitment to the ideals of disinterested criticism and color-blind justice; advancement according to merit, not according to sex, race, or ethnic origin: these quintessentially Western ideas are bedrocks of our political as well as our educational system. And they are precisely the ideas that are …
Exclusive Education Requires Exclusive Worship
“Christian education cannot be sustained apart from the exclusive worship of the triune God. And such worship cannot be offered to Him and to demos. He will not accept it, and, incidentally, neither will demos. The establishment of a Christian school movement is in principle a threat to the current establishment, and the establishment knows …
Baggage Handles
“The fact of the matter is that we can no more choose our culture and its languages than we can our parents. A trendy academic recently urged his peers to make a careful selection among what he called our ‘cultural baggage.’ We should not deceive ourselves, however. If our culture and its traditions are baggage, …
They Feel Good All Over
“Like most modern tyrannies, the dictatorship of the politically correct has freely used and abused the rhetoric of virtue in its effort to enforce conformity and silence dissent. This is part of what makes it so seductive. How gratifying to know that one is automatically on the side of Virtue simply because one espouses the …