“When Isaiah cries out that we are to behold our God, he does so in a way that does not encourage us to start looking under the furniture. This is not altered in the slightest by his use of an image taken from the created order. Yet even here, each single image, however wonderful, if …
If One’s Good, Two Must Be Better
“Though Realtor Mom likes Wal-Mart, it’s the price club that really gets her heart racing, because price clubs are Wal-mart on acid. Here you can get laundry detergent in 41-pound tubs, 30-pound bags of frozen Tater Tots, frozen waffles in 60-serving boxes, and packages of 1,500 Q-tips, which is 3,000 actual swabs since there’s cotton …
Flesh That Reveals the Father
“The majesty of biblical poetry always lifts our thoughts up. Biblical poetic expression is incarnational, which means that there is a body of ‘flesh,’ but it is a body which reveals the Father. Idolatrous poetic expression reveals nothing from above, and spends its energy in rearranging matter down here below. Idolatrous images of the divine …
Cloth Ratios
“[In] America today the average square yardage of boyswear grows and grows, while the square inches in the girls’ outfits shrinks and shrinks. The boys carry so much fabric they look like skateboarding Bedouins, and the girls look like preppy prostitutes.” [David Brooks, On Paradise Drive (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. 56]
A Theological Tin Ear
“Human language is necessarily inadequate whenever men speak about God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth. But there is creaturely inadequacy, a holy limitation, revealed in virtually every word of Scripture, and then there is an impudent inadequancy. The thing which differentiates the two is not the element of anthropomorphic images (which are …
Foods of the World
“The rule in these pedestrian-friendly town centers is ‘Fight a way, gain a restaurant.’ You’ll find Afghan eateries, Vietnamese restaurants, Lebanese diners, Japanese sushi bars alongside dining options from Haiti, Cambodia, India, Mongolia, and Moscow. And this is not to even mention the Cosi-style casual dining spots offering shiitake mushroom panini sandwiches or the gourmet …
Imagination Succeeds When It Staggers
“When a biblical vision of the living God is given to us, human imagination staggers, and human reason lies prostrate on the floor. Isaiah is undone, a man of unclean lips, and Moses is hidden in the cleft of the rock so that he will not be dissolved. In the revelation of Himself to us, …
A Bag of Cardboard Chips
“The folks at Trader Joe’s also confront higher moral problems, such as snacks. Everyone knows that snack food is morally suspect, since it contributes to t he obesity of the American public, but the clientele still seems to want it. So the folks behind this enterprise have managed to come up with globally concerned stomach …
God the Playwright
[Speaking of God as the universal playwright] “But using the illustration of a play is offensive to us. We say that Hamlet is a fictional character, whereas we are real. It is not a good comparison, we mutter, but notice where and why we take offense. We are much greater than Hamlet, and zeal for …
AmeriCool
“We sort of take coolness for granted because it is so much around us. However, coolness is one of those pervasive and revolutionary constructs that America exports around the globe. Coolness is a magical state of grace, and as we take our drive through America, we will see that people congregate into communities not so …