C.S. Lewis wrote a poem once—Lines During a General Election—and the first two lines go like this: “Their threats are terrible enough, but we could bear All that; it is their promises that bring despair . . .”
A Slow-Moving Pharaoh
Just a quick note to (again) clarify what I am doing with regard to Sarah Palin. As I am thinking through the whole business, some have jumped to conclusions about what I am doing, or where I must be going, or they have otherwise missed the point. Stated positively, I have wanted to clear away …
Democrats of the Shining Dawn
Just a few things right out of the starting blocks. First, I agree with Tim Bayly’s argument on the creation order and women in civil leadership. Second, I don’t really agree with Geoffrey Botkin’s argument that the Sarah Palin move on the part of the GOP is the mother of all sucker plays. I agree …
Just A Tad
I have made reference before to the problems caused by persnickety third party perfectionism, and, you know, I still think that. But there is always a ditch on both sides of the road. And after watching some of the high finance monkeyshines over the last week, led by all the usual suspects, I was left …
Rape and Incest Exceptions
One of the things I have learned as a pastor is that as a church grows and matures, the minister cannot assume that everybody is up to speed on something just because he “preached a sermon series” on that a little while before. It was probably more like five years before, and half the people …
Patriotism With Pom Poms
Yesterday we had a stimulating discussion at the NSA graduate forum, and I was going to take a moment here to let some of my afterthoughts spill over. We were discussing whether the left wing/right wing distinction is inherently an idolatrous one. Anyone who has followed this blog for very long knows that there is …
The Politics of Blood
From the interview with Charles Gibson, it appears that Sarah Palin is entirely on board with John McCain’s foreign policy — a foreign policy that I am not on board with. I am not a neocon, and I have no sympathy with the broader neocon objectives, which can be described as a democratic and secular …
Barak Was a Great Warrior
One of the things revealed in many of the comments for these posts on Sarah Palin is that certain subtexts of what “every Christian knows” are quite prevalent, and they do a fine job in controlling the narratives that we try to tell or try to read. One of these is the shared assumption that …
The Lipstick Affair
I have been blogging on presidential politics, and hence it is therefore mandatory that I say something about the Lipstick Affair. I will keep it brief. I watched the video clip in question, and nothing is more apparent than that Obama was not making any kind of conscious reference to Sarah Palin. It also looked …
The Creation Order and Sarah
Earlier today I had a conversation with a good friend about an underlying principle in all this talk about Sarah Palin, women in politics, Deborah as judge, and so on, and we agreed on an important principle. This is the kind of thing that should go without saying, but in these deranged times, almost nothing …