What Government Is At the founding of this country, a foundational idea was what conservatives refer to as limited government. I won’t quote the Declaration of Independence to you, but I’ll state the principle as being that people are to be left alone as far as can be, and that the government exists only to […]
Read more...Category: Christianity and Culture
Manchester by the Sea
I try to comment on books or movies I read or see that seem to have some depth to them, or if they provide an insight that I think might be helpful. I watched Manchester by the Sea after having seen some good reviews. I wondered what the fuss was about but didn’t want to […]
Read more...Zeitgeist
Two weeks ago I posted on the subject of materialism, and what it means to the concept of love. See Love, Materialist Style. It occurs to me that an explanation of that word, “materialism,” is in order. Not just to define it, but to explain its place in the thesis. “Materialism” in this context is […]
Read more...Wester
Easter In last year’s Easter post I talked about the origin of that word, “Easter.” It is a reference to the direction, east, where the morning sun rises as a metaphor for the resurrection to come. In the early days of Christianity, new believers understood they were embracing the God of the Jews, and the […]
Read more...Rough Water Baptism
Author Albert Norton Announces Release of Rough Water Baptism, Story of a Young Woman’s Awakening Set in San Francisco Bay Area Atlanta, GA — Literary fiction author Albert Norton announces the release of his second novel, Rough Water Baptism (ISBN 978-1-63213-268-0). The book can be found Amazon.com, the publisher’s site, electiopublishing.com, and the author’s site, albertnorton.com. […]
Read more...Youth Group Cringe
The Wise Kids is a 2011 film that for some reason is just now starting to gain traction. It’s probably a sleeper because it’s artsy and think-y. Probably also because the two-line blurb for the movie is, as usual with Netflix, remarkably inept. First Things contributor Eve Tushnet did a good write-up on the movie […]
Read more...Why Am I Here?
Is there any more fundamental question? It is so fundamental to human experience that it must be hard-wired into us that we find a purpose for ourselves; and if we don’t, that we invent it. Religion and Longing One might suppose that religion is just such an invention. But if religion is an invention of man, we’re still […]
Read more...The Form of the Forms
For many Christians, the existence of God is self-evident, reconfirmed in a thousand ways, and so there’s a tendency not to spend too much time on the introductory course, the “why I know there’s a God 101” course. It’s good to do so, however. Let’s consider now the purpose and design we instinctively impute to […]
Read more...Modern Oregon Trail
Micro-review: The Oregon Trail/A New American Journey, by Rinker Buck. This book came out to a lot of advance publicity in 2015. It’s the story of the author’s and his brother’s covered wagon trip from Independence, Missouri to eastern Oregon, following the old Oregon Trail as closely as possible. I picked up the book because […]
Read more...The Satanic Temple
(Photo Josh Reynolds/Washington Post) You may have heard about this effort to introduce a private after-school program for “Satanic Temple” in public schools. As reported in The Washington Post among many other places, it is a program offered in reaction to after-school Christian clubs. Their serious goal is to provide an atheist alternative. Their not-so-serious […]
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