Mar 7, 2015 | Uncategorized
I became a Christian when I was 18, well before I was to get married and had to think about having children. When I did, like many conservative protestants, I uncritically accepted birth control and the family planning mentality; I saw having children as something of a choice for Christians, not unlike my secular neighbors. A few times over the years this mindset was challenged, but certainly not from within the evangelical community. Our seriously orthodox Catholic brothers and sisters would point out that life is a gift from God, and that God’s gifts must not be lightly rejected. Yet evangelicals continue to have their 2.2 kids like most Americans, and never question whether their embrace of the modern cultural norm is at all biblical.
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Mar 4, 2015 | Uncategorized
[Naturalism] must forever remain a pure assertion, a pure conviction, a confession of blind assurance in an inaccessible beyond; and that beyond, more paradoxically still, is the beyond of no beyond. And naturalism’s claim that, by confining itself to purely material explanations for all things, it adheres to the only sure path of verifiable knowledge is nothing but a feat of sublimely circular thinking; physics explains everything, which we know because anything physics cannot explain does not exist, which we know because whatever exists must be explicable by physics, which we know because physics explains everything.
–David Bentley Hart, The Experience of god: Being, Consciousness, Bliss
Mar 2, 2015 | Uncategorized
When we look at American exceptionalism through the lens of dissociation, that exceptionalism is transformed into garden-variety white supremacy. Dissociation sees this exceptionalism as proof of America’s evil character. It ignores two or three millennia of profound cultural evolution in the West, and it attributes the exceptionalism that results from that evolution to little more than a will to dominate, oppress, and exploit people of color. So in this new and facile liberalism, American exceptionalism and white supremacy become nearly interchangeable. Shift one’s angle of vision ever so slightly to the left, and there is white supremacy; ever so slightly to the right, and there is American exceptionalism.
When you win the culture, you win the extraordinary power to say what things mean — you get to declare the angle of vision that assigns the “correct” meaning.
–Shelby Steele, “Conservatism as Counterculture”
Mar 1, 2015 | Uncategorized
This question, most unfortunately, is the title of a piece in the online publication Vox, which is mainstream liberal in its coverage. Knowing that, which I did, it would have been easy to write off such a sentiment as biased. But deep down we all know “Christian” movies are not very good. If you want to know why, reading this article is a great start. But to really understand the dynamic of mediocrity in Christian movies and other cultural pursuits, you have to go back to the development of the Christian subculture in the 20th Century. (more…)
Feb 24, 2015 | Uncategorized
Even Annie did not then know that it was the soul’s hunger, the vague sense of a need which nothing but the God of human faces can satisfy, that sent her money-loving, poverty-stricken, pining, grumbling old aunt out staring toward the east. It is this formless idea of something at hand that keeps men and women striving to tear from the bosom of the world the secret of their own hopes. How little they know that what they look for is in reality their God!
–George MacDonald, The Maiden’s Bequest
Feb 21, 2015 | Uncategorized
We sat in absolute silence then. I was stunned. I was, and I knew it, an ordinary person who long after he was grown retained the childhood assumption that the people who largely control our lives are somehow better informed than, and have judgment superior to, the rest of us; that they are more intelligent. Not until Vietnam did I finally realize that some of the most important decisions of all time can be made by men knowing really no more than, and who are not more intelligent than, most of the rest of us. That it was even possible that my own opinions and judgment could be as good as and maybe better than a politician’s who made a decision of profound consequence. Some of that childhood awe and acceptance of authority remained, and while I was sitting before Esterhazy’s desk–the room silent, everyone watching me, waiting–it seemed presumptuous that ordinary Simon Morely should question the judgment of this board. And of the men in Washington who agreed with it. Yet I knew I had to. And was going to.
–Jack Finney, Time and Again
I became a Christian when I was 18, well before I was to get married and had to think about having children. When I did, like many conservative protestants, I uncritically accepted birth control and the family planning mentality; I saw having children as something of a choice for Christians, not unlike my secular neighbors. A few times over the years this mindset was challenged, but certainly not from within the evangelical community. Our seriously orthodox Catholic brothers and sisters would point out that life is a gift from God, and that God’s gifts must not be lightly rejected. Yet evangelicals continue to have their 2.2 kids like most Americans, and never question whether their embrace of the modern cultural norm is at all biblical.
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