Apr 25, 2015 | Uncategorized
Man is a worshiping animal. And since this is 2015 I have to point out the “man” includes woman (male and female he created them, Gen. 1:27). If we don’t worship the true and living God, we will worship something else; as Calvin says, the human heart is an idol making factory. We modern people are much more creative, and so much more sophisticated than the ancients who worshiped animals and such carved in stone or wood. For us it’s money or a career, or family, or power, or sex, or sports teams, or health, or looks, or lovers, or almost ad infinitum. As God through Elijah demonstrates with the prophets of Baal, idols and false gods do not deliver.
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Apr 24, 2015 | Uncategorized
Christian conservatives have barely begun to fight. Christians, following the examples of the Apostles, should never retreat from the public square. They must leave only when quite literally forced out, after expending every legal bullet, availing themselves of every right of protest, and after exhausting themselves in civil disobedience. Have cultural conservatives spent half the energy on defense that the Left has spent on the attack?
–David French, “Cultural Conservatives Have Barely Begun to Fight”
Apr 22, 2015 | Uncategorized
When a school learns that one of its alums has achieved great things, the institution will usually seek to promote those accomplishments. But there are exceptions. If it’s discovered, for example, that the former student also happens to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan, or a neo-Nazi, or a convicted felon, then the school will naturally seek to downplay the connection — and to sever any explicit ties between them. To this list of offenses — normally reserved only for bigots and criminals — we can now apparently add opposing same-sex marriage.
–Damon Linker, “The shunning of Ryan T. Anderson: When support for gay marriage gets ugly”
Apr 21, 2015 | Uncategorized
The “Black Lives Matter” campaign is based on as big a lie as the “campus rape culture” lie, the Rolling Stone magazine gang rape at the University of Virginia fraternity lie, the gang rape by the Duke University lacrosse team lie, the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” Ferguson lie, and all the other lies that animate leftist hysterias. Building hysterias based on falsehoods is a primary modus operandi on the left. One can even say that without hysteria there is no Left.
–Dennis Prager, “Black Murderers Matter”
Apr 19, 2015 | Uncategorized
In the last 10 years the world has had to endure the plague of the “New Atheists.” While not as deadly as those Moses helped visit upon the Egyptians, they are still excruciatingly annoying. Their arguments, such as they are, reveal a type of trite fundamentalism that continually begs the question, over and over and over. But not all atheists are New; one “Old” atheist is British philosopher John Gray, who recently penned a piece for The Guardian titled, “What Scares the New Atheists.”
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Apr 18, 2015 | Uncategorized
How can I teach my students to write decently when the English language has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Academic-Industrial Complex? Our language used to belong to all its speakers and readers and writers. But in the 1970s and ’80s, arrogant ideologues began recasting English into heavy artillery to defend the borders of the New Feminist state. In consequence we have all got used to sentences where puffed-up words like “chairperson” and “humankind” strut and preen, where he-or-she’s keep bashing into surrounding phrases like bumper cars and related deformities blossom like blisters; they are all markers of an epoch-making victory of propaganda over common sense.
We have allowed ideologues to pocket a priceless property and walk away with it. Today, as college students and full-fledged young English teachers emerge from the feminist incubator in which they have spent their whole lives, this victory of brainless ideology is on the brink of becoming institutionalized. If we mean to put things right, we can’t wait much longer.
Our ability to write and read good, clear English connects us to one another and to our common past. The prime rule of writing is to keep it simple, concrete, concise. Shakespeare’s most perfect phrases are miraculously simple and terse. (“Thou art the thing itself.” “A plague o’ both your houses.” “Can one desire too much of a good thing?”) The young Jane Austen is praised by her descendants for having written “pure simple English.” Meanwhile, in everyday prose, a word with useless syllables or a sentence with useless words is a house fancied-up with fake dormers and chimneys. It is ugly and boring and cheap, and impossible to take seriously.
–David Gelernter in,“We Came in Peace, for All Humankind: A decade of “Social Justice Warriors” waging all-out war against the dictionary.”
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