Month: September 2006

• Tony Esolen: “…an egalitarian destroys the very things whose equality he asserts.”

  Touchstone Magazine – Mere Comments: All Flattened Things are Equal In academe, it is simply assumed by almost everybody that sex differences are at most superficial. To quote a coarse and not terribly perceptive female member of the Army: “The only thing the men can do that the women can’t do is urinate through a…

• Tony Esolen: “All Flattened Things Are Equal”

  Touchstone Magazine – Mere Comments: All Flattened Things are Equal All Flattened Things are Equal…how can Christians fail to see that equality and hierarchy are not necessarily contradictory, seeing that they have the examples of the obedience of the Son to the Father, and of the inner life of the Trinity itself? Which brings me…

• Unknown: To Replace A Lightbulb

  I stole this from somewhere. During a Eucharistic Congress, a number of priests from different orders are gathered in a church for Vespers. While they are praying, a fuse blows and all the lights go out. The Benedictines continue praying from memory, without missing a beat. The Jesuits begin to discuss whether the blown fuse…

• On Alienation, prompted by Jacques Ellul

  Quotes are from “The Ethics of Freedom”… The Bible often talks about the bondage of man…We read of the institution of slavery. We also find bondage to corruption, to the stoicheia of this world….The ending of formal slavery has softened the term. But the situation described remains the same. In our own age the equivalent…

• Masai Creed: “The Hyenas Did Not Touch Him”

    From an article titled “Delighted by Doctrine” in  Christianity Today Magazine.  The link is long dead.   As a capstone to his lifelong interest in the central texts of the Christian faith, [Jaroslav] Pelikan edited (with Valerie Hotchkiss) what could only be called a second magnum opus—Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition,…

• Dallas Willard: Paralyzed by grace

  In most churches we’re not only saved by grace, we’re paralyzed by it. We’re afraid to do anything that might be a “work.” The funny thing is we will preach to people for an hour that they can’t do anything to be saved, and then sing to them for a half an hour trying to…

• Dallas Willard: Discipleship is no essential part of Christianity today

  A Divine Conspirator – Christianity Today Magazine Generally, what I find is that the ordinary people who come to church are basically running their lives on their own, utilizing ‘the arm of the flesh’—their natural abilities—to negotiate their way,” he says. “They believe there is a God and they need to check in with him.…

• Allegiance To Jesus Is Saving Faith

  Jesus is Lord” is the original confession of faith, test of orthodoxy, bond of fellowship, and death gasp. This confession is the test of the New Covenant in the same way that “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one…” was the confessional test of the Old.  It is a confession, not of belief,…

• Praise music: show, don’t tell

  It is a commonplace now to lament the superficiality of contemporary Christian praise music. Before I comment on that, let’s not get too indignant. The contemporary praise movement is largely a youth movement. The music is composed by young people for young people. Don’t look now, but young people are almost always superficial. If they…