I have not yet said very much about the Paige Patterson affair in the Southern Baptist Convention. This has been a function of my general busyness, my lack of knowledge about the back story, and assorted other stuff. The one thing I wouldn’t want it to be is a function of timidity. Depending on who …
Up Near the Spigot
As I was reading what Warhorn was saying about the Revoice conference in St. Louis (a critique in four parts), I noticed that Wesley Hill was one of the main speakers. I also noticed that he had a new book out, called Spiritual Friendship: Finding Love in the Church as a Celibate Gay Christian, which …
Sand in the Sugar Bowl
Introduction: We certainly live in crazy times, but they are a particular brand of crazy times. The more advanced the lunacy gets, the more difficult it becomes to remember what normality might look like. And the weirder it all gets, the more we seem to cultivate our appetite for the weird. Our cultural apostasy is …
Dirty Omniscience
Introduction: The next time you find yourself in need of a deeply unsettling experience, I suggest that you click here, and then scroll through some of the things that Dylan Curran found out about himself, as stored up by some of our brainier brethren. All the same stuff has no doubt been stored up about …
The Beauty of Discrimination
Introduction: A few older people remember how the verb to discriminate once was a term of praise. He is a “discriminating reader,” or he has a “discriminating palate” when it comes to fine wines, or she has “discriminating taste” when it comes to her art collection. In all such expressions, while someone might react to …
Two Strippers Instead of Four
And now let us speak of how National Review has finally donned some silk undies, and begun their regimen of hormone shots. When I first subscribed to National Review I was in high school, which puts that time at almost fifty years ago. In other words, it was a lot closer to the time when …
Outrage Overload
Introduction: There are two ways to develop a sensitive conscience, one good and one bad. The first is to accept, own, and practice the weightier matters of the law. Once you have mastered the great principles, or rather have been mastered by them, it becomes possible to move into the more refined questions. This is …
Biblicism and Nature’s Law
Cornelius Van Til once said that the Scriptures were authoritative in all they addressed . . . and they addressed everything. This is as true as it gets, but we all need to be a little bit more careful—“for the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light” (Luke …
Death Panels
I am emerging from a few weeks that were more hectic than usual, during which time I didn’t have as much available time for tracking the news as I normally do. And so it was that the horrific Alfie story from the UK only registered with me slowly. I say this so that no one …
The Economics of Sexual Purity
Introduction: One of the things that radical feminists got right, and which doe-eyed romantics got wrong, is the fact that sex within marriage is manifestly an economic institution. But they then went on to wreck this insight by saying that this made marriage a glorified form of prostitution, when they should actually have made the …