“Increasingly, second- and third-tier schools are rushing to embrace all manner of fashionable intellectual ideologies as so many formulas for garnering prestige, publicity, and ‘name’ professors (and hoping thereby to attract more students and other sources of income) without having to distinguish themselves through the less-glamorous and more time-consuming methods of good teaching and lasting …
Funny. The Post-Enlightenment Is Demanding All the Same Stuff.
“The Enlightenment’s centerpiece was freedom. Indeed, its demand was freedom: freedom from the past, freedom from God, and freedom from authority” [David Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), p. 29].
Food Stamps for the Brain
“But if the government adopts responsibilities that God never assigned and begins massive redistributions of wealth accordingly, this creates an ethical problem. King Ahab stole Naboth’s vineyard. Even though Ahab was the established authority, he could not alter the reality of this theft by calling it something else — zoning alterations or land reform. Parents …
Watching One Dragon Eat the Other One
“Modernity itself is in deep crisis, and the postmodern ethos which is sweeping over it is bringing not only some relief to evangelical faith which had been abandoned on the margins by modernity, but also a whole new set of challenges.” [David Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), p. 11]
Gaining Tenure Through “Eye of Newt” and “Dried Bat Liver”
“This is where the jargon of deconstruction, poststructuralism, and kindred Continental imports has been a godsend for ‘cutting edge’ academics. It has allowed them to indulge their moralism to the hilt while at the same time appearing to be intellectually sophisticated (or incomprehensible, which is often just as effective).” (Tenured Radicals, p. xvi).
Tapering Off Backwards
“But in the meantime, private schools that care about their academic integrity need to resolve to have nothing to do with vouchers themselves. he who takes the king’s coin becomes the king’s man. Whatever kindness God may show to those making their way out of Egypt, those who have already made it out and who …
How the Impotent Lecture on Power Relations
“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).