“The late Joseph Bayly wrote a delightful little book some years ago called The Gospel Blimp, which lampooned the earlier forms of this kind of evangelistic absurdity, back when inane evangelicalism was still slogging it out in the minors. It is hard to imagine what a man of his gifts would do with the embarrassment …
Ethereal Hermit Crabs
“The authoritas verborum is an external and ‘accidental’ authority that falls away in the process of any interpretation, however good. But in considering this we must be careful not to think of a naked, internal essence of a given word, a wordless word, and an outer accidental clothing. It would be better, I think, to …
Department of Hip Resources
“The people who staff the Combine aren’t like Nurse Ratched. They aren’t Frank Burns, they aren’t the Church Lady, they aren’t Dean Wormer from Animal House, they are not those repressed old folks in the commercials who want to ban Tropicana Fruit Twisters. They’re hipper than you can ever hope to be because hip is …
Repenting of Virtues
“So one of the central points of biblical satire is that we must not only repent of our sins, but also of those ‘virtues’ for which we preen ourselves. We have trouble seeing such virtues as sinful, because we have neglected the essential practice of bringing the Word of God to bear on ourselves — …
Language Is Not Mathematics
“We must come to understand incarnational translation, which is to say, understanding translation as interpretation. There are two ways an interpreter can fail. One is through assuming that the languages he works with are like mathematics and that any deviance from that standard should be considered as a failing. This is the way of the …
Dreadlocks at Taco Bell
“But one hardly has to go to a poetry reading to see the countercultural idea acted out. Its frenzied ecstasies have long since become an official aesthetic of consumer society, a monotheme of mass as well as adversarial culture. Turn on the TV and there it is instantly: the unending drama of consumer unbound and …
Different Temple, Same Moneychangers
“In the same way, the critic of Jesus junk stores is assumed to be a critic of Jesus. But of course, scriptural satire assumes that the foremost critic of Jesus junk stores would be Jesus Himself. If Christ were to go to the Christian Booksellers convention (CBA) and see all the crap being hawked with …
Why Do We Park in Driveways and Drive on Parkways?
“This brings us to the relation of logic and reason to the business of human language. The relativist wants to say that there is no relation, and the precisionist wants to say there is a precise and settle relation. But neither fits the situation. The logic of words is not the same as the detached, …
Aboriginal Hip
“The patron saints of the counterculture idea are, of course, the Beats, whose frenzied style and merry alienation still maintain a powerful grip on the American imagination. Even forty years after the publication of On the Road, the works of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs remain the sine qua non of dissidence, the model for aspiring …
That Wholesome Glow
“The critic of Thomas Kinkade paintings, where all the puddles on the ground have their eerie radioactive glow, and all the bungalows look like the living room has just caught on fire, is assumed to be a critic who is hostile to home, hearth, and wholesome family values. But the actual object of his hostility …