The New Yorker cartoon dates from the early part of the twentieth century, and the caption has entered into national lexicon of snappy comebacks for a reason. You know, cut to the chase. What’s the bottom line? Cash it out for me. It brings to mind an admirable method of reasoning, one of the valid …
Postmodernism and My Neighbor
Please let me take a moment of your time so that I might explain why I hate postmodernism so much. It is the same reason, at bottom, why I hate socialism so much. But I repeat myself — they are at root the same thing, actually. Modernity is a good thing, brought into existence by …
Reading Our Cues
In our circles we talk a lot about narrative, and as I have been preaching through 1 Samuel (an extended narrative), I have been thinking about this subject a goodish bit. Throw in the postmodern talent for getting such things muddled, and you have a subject where care is required. The glory of Hamlet is …
Natural Law and the Brownies
Let me see if I can do something to simplify the idea of natural law or, as I would prefer to state it, natural revelation. A couple of boys go home after school, accompanied by a couple of their unbelieving friends. When they get to the house, they find it clean and in good order. …
Brain Snakes
And the Frankish magi and sayers of sooth approached the emperor, and said not to be afraid of this serpent of YHWH. For the word and rod of the wise man had become a great serpent before the emperor. “Lo,” they said, “do we not have brain snakes every bit as large as this one?” …
Using the Reductio
A friend sent me this critical review of Pearcey’s Saving Leonardo. I have not yet finished Leonardo, so I will not say a whole lot about that. But I did notice a flaw in the critique/review that is a very common mistake in debates like this. I have noted it many times, and I think …
Christ and Rusty Hinges
Understanding the biblical story as a whole is what enables us to understand the cycles within that story. If the Bible were just a grab bag of illustrations and anecdotes, to be applied by us willy nilly, then any fool could justify any situation at any time. But there is a logic to these things, …
Worldview Fist Pumping
After my previous post on Pearcey and the pomos, one correspondent wrote to me, asking me to respond to this review of Pearcey’s book by Alissa Wilkinson. Now in the review, Wilkinson has a laudable “credit where credit is due” pattern that I appreciated very much. But at the end of the day, she was …
Let Us Depart Hence
In Saving Leonardo, Nancy Pearcey writes very helpfully about the fact/value distinction that modern secularism depends upon. In doing this, she is taking one of Francis Schaeffer’s basic illustrations and pushing it into the corners. One particularly helpful observation she made is that postmodernism, despite all the posturing, keeps this quintessential modern dichotomy intact. Postmodernism …
The Hell of Pomo Thot
Over at JesusCreed, we discover the last refuge of the scoundrel is not patriotism. It is actually C.S. Lewis. The intro to that post says this: “I’m not enough of a C.S. Lewis expert to give a definitive answer, though I always have thought the end of The Last Battle went in a universalistic direction. …