Thomas Umstattd Jr. recently made a splash with his article “Why Courtship is Fundamentally Flawed.” To be perfectly honest, I thought a number of his points were very good, like frosted flakes in the bowl glinting in the morning light of your quiet breakfast nook. But I also thought, retaining the honesty theme here, that …
No High Like the Most High!
Okay, this is for all you people, like me, who need to get out more. Apparently there is this Christian rock star, Vicky Beeching, who has written worship music that lots of people sing, and who has come out of the closet as being something that rhymes with say. You can read a brief interview …
The Word Count of Righteousness
I am currently reading a (very good) book on preaching by William Willimon. The book is entitled Proclamation and Theology, and Willimon is a bishop in the United Methodist Church. He plainly got to his position of influence there because of intelligence, learning, grace, and wisdom. But. He is in a liberal denomination, surrounded of …
Say It With Ink
I have been busy of late, and so haven’t gotten to a plug of what my friend Steve Jeffery recently said about tattoos. But I am now in a position to remedy my shortcomings, and so here is the link. While I am at it, I shall also include a New Yorker cartoon for your …
Merchants of Resentment
Is it possible to sow the wind and reap the whirlwind (Hos. 8:7)? Well, of course it is. We live in a world where disproportional effects can follow hard after trivial causes. Not only so, but the disproportional effects can be unevenly distributed. Two toddlers disobey their mothers in exactly the same way, and one …
Sexual Justice
If you stick around, in just a moment I am going to be dealing with the problem created by registered sex offenders attending church. However, before we get there, I want to say something about the cultural context we find ourselves in. And that said, I want to warn you beforehand that the point I …
Crime in a World Without Crimes
“Thou shalt not follow the multitude to do evil” (Ex. 23:2). In an earlier post, I said that consistency was necessary in any worldview seeking to build a civilization. It is not necessary if the point is to tear a civilization down. If that is the goal, then radical swerves and changes help to achieve …
Bundle Up, Girls!
Last year, when I debated Andrew Sullivan over same sex mirage — he claiming to see it, and me claiming not to, for is it not a mirage? — one of the arguments that I advanced was this one: Given the premises and arguments of same sexery, we have absolutely no reason to limit marriage …
The Gaylag Archipelago
So a marginal football player got drafted into the NFL, kissed his boyfriend smack on the lips, and then another football player tweeted something that expressed the sentiment ick gross, and so the second player was hustled into sensitivity training. Got that? As the revolution is established, there will be no heckling. Kirsten Powers got …
The Suitor and His Porn
In these times of ubiquitous porn, one of the unfortunate results is that young women and their parents have to sort out what it all means. In raising this question, I do not mean to imply that young women can’t have a porn problem — some do, but it is not as common, and usually …