Author: Tim

• G.K. Chesterton: “They are walking in their sleep and try to wake themselves up with nightmares.”

  There comes an hour in the afternoon when the child is tired of “pretending”, when he is weary of being a robber or red Indian.  It is then when he torments the cat.  There comes a time in the routine of an ordered civilization when man is tired of playing at mythology and pretending that…

• David Allen: “…the same thought twice…”

  “There is no reason to have the same thought twice, unless you like having that thought.”    (GTD, 22)

• Annie Dillard: “…the sleeping god may wake some day…”

  “On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions.   Does any-one have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke?   Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it?   The churches are children playing on the floor with their…

• Dressing for worship

  The truth is that both dressing down and dressing up are biblical, as are all styles of music.   When the Lord was worshiped in the temple they used their best dress and pomp and circumstance.   They also used every instrument they could get their hands on and made quite a hoopla. But then…

• Globalization and St. John’s Apocalypse

  The dissolution of national identities derives inexorably from the Biblical view of the human heart.   This trend over long history is not a Judeo-Christian prescription; it’s just a description. It is men who drive history, not something outside us.   Technology is just the storehouse of men’s tools. And men make tools to, first, survive,…

• Genesis 2: Eve’s curiosity

  Eve’s sin was to prefer the exploration of the world to obediance to God, taking the evidence of her senses as the final arbiter on good and evil.   And the context of the incident is important: Eve could explore 99% of the universe with impunity.   This freedom to explore a rational universe accounts…

• This, Yet That: The Rhythm of Orthodoxy

  The New Testament does not teach “two natures in one person”, if that means two blobs, joined at the hip.   The church used that nomenclature to articulate the implications of the NT, in a process dominated by the Greek static concept “nature”.    Those who articulated “two natures in one person” would also hold…

• Thinking Out Loud On Air Pollution

  I am, generally, a conservative in matters of government regulation.   However, I agree with the use of government force to keep visible pollutants out of my air.   Simple as that. There has to be a limit, of course, based on practicality. Controlling perfume, for example,  is not practical and the problem (though legitimate)…

• Politics, Cliff’s notes version

  There is money and there is sex.  All politics is a fight over these two gods. The purest form of the political Right:  a few rules about sex, a few rules about money. The purest form of the political Left:  many rules about sex, omnipresent rules about money.

• Against Iconoclasts

  ## connect up to discussion of images In a culture filled with idols, the Ante-Nicene fathers were right to distrust pictures and statues. But to make their distrust into a dominant mood for all times and places is to over-react. This wouldn’t be the first issue which Tertullian and Jerome carried to an extreme in…