Category: My Commonplace Book

• Dougles Wilson: On Children In Church

  Pastor Wilson speaks for those of us who think that “seeker sensitive” started in “children’s church” and ends in Ipod Church, where every person just downloads their own church service and plays it into their ear buds. BLOG and MABLOG Many years ago we made the decision to disband our children’s church and nursery, and…

• Victor Davis Hanson: “…the West itself…vanished on the altar of therapy.”

  Works and Days » Ten Random, Politically Incorrect Thoughts The K-12 public education system is essentially wrecked. No longer can any professor expect an incoming college freshman to know what Okinawa, John Quincy Adams, Shiloh, the Parthenon, the Reformation, John Locke, the Second Amendment, or the Pythagorean Theorem is. An entire American culture, the West…

• “There is a brilliantly worded explanation for this.”

  CЯЦISIИG DOШИ ТНЕ СОДST OF THE HIGH БДЯБДЯEE “Lots of people are secure in their religious beliefs using rationale akin to, “There is a brilliantly worded explanation for this.” The problem is that mutually exclusive beliefs can all claim this. I Either every belief with such an explanation is truly a reasonable thing to believe,…

• Liberalism: suicide by…greed

  Power Line Given that poorer citizens always outnumber the rich, political philosophers have long worried that government based on majority rule could lead to organized theft from the wealthy by the democratic masses. “If the majority distributes among itself the things of a minority, it is evident that it will destroy the city,” warns Aristotle.…

• John Milton on the government’s role in the bailout

  Instapundit.com “Chaos Umpire sits, And by decision more imbroils the fray. By which he Reigns.”

• Who to marry: Esolen’s rules:

  Touchstone Magazine – Mere Comments: The Rules So then, whom could you marry? A long time ago we came up with something we called “Esolen’s Rules.” They’re only half facetious. But they are an attempt to get at the normal: 1. Don’t marry a woman who likes cats but does not like dogs.  You may…

• Katsushika Hokusai: How long for artists to learn…

  From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects…

• Peter Kreeft: Modernism As Rationalized Promiscuity

  Every single one of the liberal heresies justifies sexual libertinism. Even scholarly issues like the dating of the four Gospels has a sexual payoff, as you will find if you talk long enough with liberal theologians. If the Gospels are not eyewitness accounts of Christ’s actual words, but the “consensus” of the “early Christian community,”…

• artist Julie Dermansky on discipline

  By Danny Gregory Inspiration is overrated. It’s all about discipline. There are glimmers of inspiration, when you lose touch with time and place but you can’t wait around for that. When I start working on something where I am so excited it’s like some sort of drug, I’m just alive. But the only way to…

• Douglas Wilson: “Fathers are jovial and open-handed”

  This is ostensibly about food, but read and think about parenting in general, and specifically Christian parenting of the strict sort, where it seldom is grasped that the  function of the father is to GIVE.   And giving that isn’t jovial (love that word) doesn’t touch the receiver as a gift. BLOG and MABLOG What…