Some of you may like my essay at Good Letters. An excerpt: “Sometimes this broken world hacks away at our flesh. Other times it hands us the blades, and we sunder ourselves. Drink down whatever forgetting medicine invites you and the stump will stop hurting, but as God is my witness, you will not move …
Monthly Archives: February 2013
A reasonable response to the accusation that the evangelical mind is insufficiently expansive is to ask to what dimensions its critics would like to see it expanded. That question springs to the lips when considering Biblical scholar Peter Enns’s contention that evangelical minds are not only confined, but are required to remain in confinement. “The …
There is a difference between being anti-intellectual and being anti-intellect, and this is where Russell Jacoby foundered, in his essay last year about the lack of intellectualism among conservatives. As Peter Lawler notes, it’s shoddily done for want of defining terms, which is a frequent flaw in Chronicle of Higher Ed essays about conservatism. There …
Look, it’s not like The Hobbit is Holy Scripture. It’s not even, last I checked, part of the Apocrypha. It seems to me that the standard for judging Peter Jackson’s film rendition, then, ought to be whether it succeeds as art, rather than its faithfulness to Tolkien’s book. If we view the film as an …
The Boy Scouts of America is considering an end to its prohibition against homosexual troop leaders, deferring that decision to local councils. Sexual molestation! cry opponents, and so into the breach rushes the conscientious journalist, whose moral obligation is to remind readers of the evidence that homosexuals are no more prone to molestation than heterosexuals. …
You might like my latest post at Good Letters. An excerpt: “We are used to words not meaning anything, you see, and so who cares if foot-long is not supposed to mean eleven inches, that cheese is not supposed to be a vegetable oil and whey composite, that deli meat is not supposed to be shaved from …