Jane Austen and Our Culture of Feeeeelings

As I noted in my brief review of Pride and Prejudice below, Jane Austen is amazing. A truly wise woman, she wrote a novel of two kinds of people — people who change and grow, and people who do not. This is simply another way of marking those who are capable of repentance and those …

Why the Future of Atheism is Bleak

What can you do when you hate someone who is completely, entirely, wholly, and necessarily out of range? When it cannot strike at the Father God, He who dwells in unapproachable light, what can the rage of impotence do? There is really only one option, and that is to strike at an effigy. You cannot …

Thinkers of Deep Thinks

So what is going on? The National Science Foundation put 400K into a study of glaciers and gender, and the results are now in. Ice is “not just ice.” “Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby …

Mystery and Contradiction

The other day I said this about logic: “if it is a wooly-mindedness that is embraced on purpose, it is heresy. This is because denying the law of non-contradiction is the royal gateway to every heresy imaginable.” Given the incoherent nature of the days we live in, I thought it was neccessary to unpack this …

Outside the Pearlies

Back at the second infamous Auburn Avenue conference, when representatives of “both sides” were trying to work something out, one particular clash came over the definition of heresy. The representatives of the TRs were taking any doctrine that was out of accord with the Westminster Confession as heresy. There are enormous problems with this, as …

Why Lies Digest So Well

As Flannery O’Connor put it, “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.” But a falsehood, as Chesterton notes, is engineered precisely so that the listeners would in fact be able to stomach it. Stomachability is a design feature when it comes to a lie. Who would invent lies that nobody …

Ten Theses on Postmodernism

This post originally ran May 10, 2010. 1. Truth is objective, ultimate, absolute, personal, alive, and triune. 2. Because of this ultimate reality, it is possible for creatures who were fashioned by this living God to know Him as the personal and ultimate truth, as well as to know lesser truths in the created world …