It’s no secret, my belief that, no matter how fetching or emotionally available a vampire is, the only proper response to him is a stake through the heart. Now Father Orthoduck opens a new can of worms, suggesting that one reason modern Americans have a tougher time slaying bloodsuckers can be laid at the feet …
“A miracle is not the breaking of the laws of the fallen world, it is the re-establishment of the laws of the kingdom of God…” (Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, Living Prayer, p. 71-2)
The great division within man is rooted not in ideology or religion or tribe, but in darkness and death, counterposed against light and life, which comes not from man but is placed within him. The line separating dark from light is the battleground of the soul, and it runs, as Solzhenitsyn said, through the heart …
This news from the BBC, about a rise in the number of pagan winter solstice celebrants in the UK, is disturbing. How could people raised in the Christian West miss the point that Christmas is about shopping until your debt rivals that of a Wall Street bank, gorging yourself for a month straight, salivating over car and …
My family and I were on vacation, and so I missed the 500th anniversary of John Calvin’s birth. I mean, July 10th happened where we were, it’s just that he wasn’t on my mind. I used to be a Calvinist. Many people I love are Calvinists. Others worship in churches that subtly advocate Calvin’s stern predestinationism, though …
Because circles, for the love of God, aren’t square Read More »
I couldn’t believe, when I first read it, that Harvard’s chaplain is an atheist. Then I felt stupid for being surprised. That die was likely cast when Harvard’s overseers struck Christo et Ecclesiae from its place surrounding Veritas on the university’s seal. What need Christ and Church, after all, when we can have unadulterated truth? Somewhere in …
I need a recommendation. Specifically, a decent biography of John Calvin. By “decent biography,” I mean something that is neither a hagiography nor a celebration of Reformation doctrine, which rules out anything, so far as I can tell, by Reformed scholars. This year is the 500th anniversary of the old boy’s birth. I figure I ought …
Anthony Sacramone’s take on Calvin, inspired by the Times Driscoll piece mentioned below: “God Hates You and Your Little Dog Too“: “But I ended my sojourn among the Calvinists because their view of justification is not so much ‘by faith alone’ as it is ‘by luck alone.’” Hat tip: Trent
“They are sinning through questioning.” This from the trendy-yet-authoritarian Seattle pastor Mark Driscoll, according to The New York Times, after two elders challenged his consolidation of church power. What’s that verse about something going before a fall?
This past Sunday I took a couple of my sons to St. George Orthodox Christian Cathedral in Wichita. If you’re not familiar with the Orthodox services, a good portion of them are conducted while the congregation stands. After a particularly long stretch of standing, Caleb leans in to me and whispers, “Dad, do we stand …
Some of my Protestant friends have the impression, inspired by lack of clarity on my part, as well as logical fallacies on the part of writers like Greg Bahnsen (who assumes sola scriptura in order to find it in Scripture), that to attack the modern application of sola scriptura is to advocate additions to Scripture. The real …
After reading John Wilson’s delightful review of Denis Donoghue’s On Eloquence, I made a note to eventually read the book. Listening to John Piper’s recent muddle-headed misinterpretation of Wilson makes me wish I had time to read the book right away. In a nutshell, whereas Wilson celebrates the beauty of words (and newborns, and well-made churches, …
From Arthur McGill’s Suffering: “In the Christian world today almost no one talks about God himself. Christians are preoccupied instead either with God’s acts — with the things that he gives us and the moral demands he makes on us, with Jesus whom he sent and the church that he created — or with the …
This from Elements of Faith, by Christos Yannaras: “The history of western man is a dialectic of submission and rebellion, where rebellion means in each case the choice of a different authority, consequently of a new submission, while the goal remains always the same — individual security, the protection of individual certainty about the truth …
