So then, it appears as though the president is making a hash of it. The Unaffordable Care Act supplies the corned beef, the hard leftism of his administration would be the little diced potatos that we see everywhere, and this latest scandal triad is the hot grease that makes the whole thing sizzle and pop …
Principles of War in Culture War
Principles that govern every form of conflict are constant in all possible scenarioes. The need for mobility, surprise, etc. will never fade away. But weapons and tactics are not constant — rocks, bows, guns, triremes, torpedoes, etc. vary from era to era, and war to war. Electronic countermeasures played no role whatever in the battle …
When He Walks Contrary to Us
Schizophrenia is no less schizophrenia if one of the voices happens to be talking sense. Hard schizophrenia is no less difficult if murderous insanity is linked up tight with weird, pathetic, and arbitrary scruples. In fact, if such an arbitary pattern is applied long enough, one may detect a method in the madness. I am …
Not Whether But Which, As I Keep Saying
It is not hard to understand the chaos and pandemonium going down around us if you keep certain inescapable realities in the forefront of your mind. Cornelius Van Til called it epistemological self-consciousness. C.S. Lewis referred to the idea this way in his great novel, That Hideous Strength. “I mean this,” said Dimble, answering the …
Broken Loose
We live in a bad neighborhood, meaning this world of ours, and so this means that we have two kinds of problems. The first would be, naturally, the bad dudes roaming the neighborhood. The second problem would be those endearing but exasperating naifs living inside the house with us, who persist in leaving invitational lights …
Hermeneutics As Sexual Identity
Something Orwell could tell us, were he here, is that the perversion of language is the mother of all subsequent perversions. In Politics and the English Language, he pointed to language that consisted “largely of euphemisms, question begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness.” Sheer cloudy vagueness. “My name is Justin Lee, and I’m a committed Christian …
A Fixed Given
One of the reasons conservative Christians are doing poorly in the public square debates over human sexuality is that the philosophical ground has shifted under our feet over the course of the last generation or two. We are trying to fight for a different conclusion from the same ground that our adversaries have defined for …
A Deeply Flawed Human Being
One of the first things a reformer has got to get used to is the experience of being despised and unpopular. Societies do awful things (that which needs to be reformed) because they want to, and the reformer is the one beckoning them to a state of affairs that they don’t much want. “You shall …
Our Gosnell Gulag
The Gosnell moment, for that is what it is, presents a clear opportunity for a real change of cultural heart. There are moments when some suppressed or ignored horror comes sharply into focus, and after that, it is not really possible to go back to the way it was before. This is what happened when …
Backpacks From the Sky
When you get to the crazy part, it is important to remember that nothing will make much sense. If sin made any real sense, it wouldn’t be sin. If being struck with a judicial stupor and blindness helped you see better, it wouldn’t be a judicial blindness. As I write this, Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev is …