So I have written about American exceptionalism before, and so let me begin with a quick review of my take in the first paragraph. Taken one way, the notion is just ten more pounds of idolatrous silliness. Every great nation at the top of its game — and there have been lots — knows how …
John Piper’s Saturday Night Special
In my response to John Piper’s post on guns, I alluded to some of the paradigmatic issues underlying the differences we have concerning what we should do with our guns — whether we should have them in the first place, and what direction we get to point them. One of the paradigmatic differences I mentioned …
Welcome the Child
One of the more notable features of the life of our Lord, as recorded in Scripture, is the fact that references to the outside world are overwhelmingly political. When Jesus was born, Augustus was Caesar (Luke 2:1) and Quirinius was governor of Syria (Luke 2:2). Herod the Great was ruler in Judea (Luke 1:5), and …
Masculinity as Cultural Gluten
As things continue to devolve, as things get ever more crazy, as our culture, to use that term loosely, continues to come unstuck, many believers have become discouraged, not knowing if there is anything they can do. Other believers have been eschatologically immobilized, thinking that these dire developments are just baked into their “last times” …
The Suicide of the West
The massacre in Paris has brought two things, already obvious, into high relief once again. We are observing, in slow motion, a collision between two very diseased cultures. The diseases are quite different but seem, in some respects, to be made for each other. One disease is listless and the other aggressive. One has no …
Principalities, Powers, and Pecksniffs
I have recently been listening through a collection of essays by C.S. Lewis, and have been having a wonderful time. I don’t have a long commute, three or four minutes is more like it, but it is amazing how much steak you can eat when you cut it up like that. I just recently finished …
No Cow in Moscow
How does one pronounce the name of our lovely little town? We have grown accustomed to telling people that there is “no cow in Moscow.” It is moss koh, not mos cowww. But there may be additional significance beyond the absence of that special bovine je ne sais quoi in our name. Or, if not …
Diversity Except for That Kind! Exhibit 783
Curling Up Under the Blanket
We live in a generation that is totalitarian in principle, having accepted all the basic totalitarian premises. Denying the Lordship of Jesus Christ drives you to those premises — for if Jesus is not Lord, then there is a vacancy that men will always want to fill. Without an exhaustive rule through the predestinating love …
5 Reasons for Thinking that Putin is No Constantine
The reason for this small piece is that some Western Christians, who really ought to know better, have been taken in by Russian photo ops, propaganda, and posturing, and have begun to describe Vladimir Putin as a new Constantine. It just goes to show. What, I am not sure exactly, but it does go to …