As Iraq continues to spiral toward chaos, and is doing so in the Facebook era, the one thing we should want to avoid is directionless or aimless outrage. Anger under such circumstances is certainly appropriate and necessary, but like a fist, it needs somewhere to land. I am writing primarily about the treatment of Christians …
On the Lam for Jesus
And of course we should all know that Christians ought not to be scofflaws. We are to be among the best citizens a magistrate ever had — we should be diligent and hard-working, dutiful and responsible, so that we might put to silence the ignorance of foolish men. We should bake the best cakes in …
The Mind of a Free Man
Villainy is not honest. I mean, c’mon. This means that when rulers are ungodly, we should expect them to be like their father, the devil, who is the father of liars (John 8:44). When they lie, they speak their native language. Bitterness and cursing are under their tongue, but of course never at the press …
A Covenant of Salt, or The Politics of Envy
The Lord Jesus compares His followers to two things, salt and light (Matt. 5:13-14). Salt that loses its saltiness is despised by men, and as a consequence is walked on. Light that is hidden from men is not something they respond to at all—because it is hidden from them. So we either have a no …
Love and Loyalty: A Meditation on the Fourth
The other day I tweeted this, and it drew more than the usual number of comments, and I thought I needed to develop it. Here is the tweet. “Feel uncomfortable at a patriotic worship service? Don’t feel superior if you would also feel uncomfortable at a Fourth of July parade.” The comments were mostly generated …
Uplift and Sunshine
This article is long enough and ignorant enough to be pretty tedious, but if you want to know how “what passes for journalism these days” is dealing with issues over on what they consider to be the Hard Right, you need look no further. “Throughout Scripture,” Leithart declared in a passage from his 2012 book …
Aluminum Deniers
A couple of posts ago, I said that limited government was absolutely dependent upon public virtue. Here’s why. It all goes back to Burke’s “little platoons.” Raw individualism is not the opposite of the collective. It is what makes the collective possible. The collective likes it. The Hive can handle a pothead bee. The collective …
Sanctuary and Parish
I have written before on the ideal relationship of church and kingdom, comparing it to the church at the center of town, and life in the kingdom fanning out into the parish from that center. Word and sacrament are at the center, and they shape and form the lives of believers outside the sanctuary, but …
The Next Big Thing
Those who pay attention to the progress of their sanctification have long noticed the optical illusion of spiritual regress. By the end of his life, after decades of faithful service to Christ, the apostle Paul saw himself by that time as the chief of sinners (1 Tim. 1:15). The more you learn, the more you …
A World of Admin
In my previous post about coercion, in which I did not have very much good to say about it, I mentioned that oppression and injustice is able to work because of its respectability. Lewis made a very similar point in the preface to Screwtape. “I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” …