This will be a hard one to explain, but let me just put it out there anyway. Those who have followed the political threads on this blog will know that I like and respect Sarah Palin. This is not to say that I believe she is necessarily equipped to be president, but my reservation at …
10 Reasons Why Sarah Palin is Formidable
I haven’t posted on politics for a bit, and I thought I needed to jot down just a few things about Sarah Palin. She is a genuinely interesting figure, and so I thought I should mention ten reasons why I believe she is formidable. 1. She makes all the right people on the left go …
Panglossian Pipe Dreams
The catastrophe in Haiti is one that ought to challenge multiple cherished assumptions, but instead it is just providing us with a venue to put them all on display yet again. I have been to Port au Prince once, when I was in the Navy, and the abject poverty there, when everything was “okay,” was …
Earthly Clay on our Heavenly Boots
I want to begin by noting the importance of being loyal to a bunch of things — in every area of life. I do not speak of idolatrous loyalty, but rather a fierce kind of Chestertonian loyalty to the piles of stuff and collections of people that God surrounds all of us with. If we …
Warriors Not Thugs
“Marry, Sirs, if Merlin who was the Devil’s son was a true King’s man as ever ate bread, is it not a shame that you, being but the sons of bitches, must be rebels and regicides?” (That Hideous Strength). A fight, by its very nature, is not delicate. This is true in spiritual warfare, and …
The Future is the True East
We need to start thinking about church/state relations in eschatological categories. If we think of them in static categories, the Christian church will find it hard to avoid becoming reactionary. That kind of conservatism is the way of death. The Marxists know what they are supposed to be doing right now because they have an …
With Twice As Many Fireworks
Here is a small hodge podge of discussion starters for when you next divvy up your seminary class into small encounter groups. To head off your curiosity, they are all in praise of Christendom. 1. The radical two kingdom approach within the Reformed world represents a fundamental capitulation to one of the central tenets of …
A Conservative What?
Somebody, I think it was William James, once referred to the scramble for the good words. And because words go in and out of fashion, the scramble can get pretty tangled and pretty interesting. People get tired of the liberals, and so everybody wants to be conservative, whatever that means. When they get tired of …
Stirring the Pan Ever More Vigorously
As I have written before, there are many political assessments that should be made on the basis of what everybody can see, and not on the basis of esoteric “insider” knowledge. Further, these judgments should certainly not be made on the basis of a paradigm powerful enough to invert what is obviously happening — powerful …
Doctor, You’re Cutting Too Deep. You’re Scratching the Table.
One of the temptations that comes to people who learn how to see and identify “deep structures” in a narrative — adeptly twirling chiasms they have found, or anticipataory foreshadowing motifs, or whatnot — is that they sometimes lose their ability to read what is right there on the page. They know that the Mississippi …