Author: Tim

• Alan Jacobs: that dialogue is between persons, not words on a page

  Goodbye, Blog – Books & Culture I find myself meditating on a passage from a book by C. S. Lewis. In his great work of literary history, Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century, Lewis devotes a passage to what he describes, with a certain savageness, as “that whole tragic farce which we call the…

• Worship Wars, part 357,899,543

  Now that we’ve spent, oh, 30 years on this, let’s see if we can sum it up: All living things retain the old, and add the new. So, let’s do both. Retain the old, add the new. Tradition is good, except when it doesn’t work. There is no reason to throw out the old because…

• Douglas Wilson: Worship as political strategy

  BLOG and MABLOG So we don’t have a political agenda, but we do have an agenda for politics. But the secularists don’t need to worry about us at all. For if Jesus is not Lord (as they claim) our means of extending His rule and reign (through worship) will be impotent in the extreme. But…

• John Howard Yoder on patience in faithfulness

  The key to the obedience of God’s people is not their effectiveness but their patience. The triumph of the right is assured not by the might that comes to the aid of the right, which is of course the justification of the use of violence and the other kinds of power in every human conflict;…

• Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “…a new type of monasticism…”

  The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience – and that means the time of religion in general. We are moving towards a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious any…

• “THEORY” From “The Scheme of Things” by Allen Wheelis

  Note: Wheelis wrote an interesting little book called “How People Change”. I don’t share his apparent rejection of the Christian faith, of course, but he is an honest and thoughtful writer, as this excerpt of another of his books shows. Be patient, the first paragraph is the slowest. I have yet to conceive the relation…

• The Law of Moral Entropy

  Secularist parents have an insufficient base for a theory of goodness so they tend to produce amoral but socially competent adults, who feel little guilt. (Whenever anyone offers the seemingly pregnant observation that religious people are plagued by guilt, my secret response is something like “duh.” Of course they do.) By “amoral” I don’t mean…

• Joseph Epstein: on reading

  The intimate abstraction of Paul Valery by Joseph Epstein One of the keenest pleasures of reading derives from being in the close company of someone more thoughtful than you but whose thoughts, owing to the courtesy of clarity, are handsomely accessible to you.

• Epstein on Valery on politics: politics gets a portion of the contempt it deserves

  The intimate abstraction of Paul Valery by Joseph Epstein Add to this his intellectual contempt for politics, which he felt took on life en masse, or in its coarsest possible form. “I consider politics, political action, all forms of politics, as inferior values and inferior activities of the mind,” he wrote. Politics is the realm…

• Embarassment

  Embarrassment is the sign that the Holy has been transgressed by an outsider. It is not something to be grown out of, but rather is a gift to the conscience, worth the whole world. We must work to guard the child’s instinctual and congenital capacity to be embarrassed. In our television culture the damage starts…