Monthly Archives: April 2009

The End of Christian America

Jon Meacham wrote a less provocative piece than its title for the magazine he edits on “The End of Christian America.”  Reactions have been mixed even if it is hard to argue either with the data that prompted the article or Meacham’s Augustinian conclusion: The columnist Cal Thomas was an early figure in the Moral… Read More→

Posted in Wilderness Wanderings | 236 Comments

Trotter is Funny, Trueman Isn’t

If the Reformation 21 Blog were a blog, this conversation could go on over there. But seeing how its authors have chosen only to mix it up among themselves, reactions to their posts turn into posts on other blogs. So Carl Trueman makes a good point about the inconsistency of evangelicals in the Church of Scotland… Read More→

Posted in Christian politics | 2 Comments

Just Grow Up

(From NTJ, January 1999) A recent visit to Yale, complete with watching a Yale-Princeton hockey game, reminded us of the suffocating ubiquity of post-1950s popular culture. Being some twenty years removed from college life it was curious to see Yale undergraduates participating in the rah-rah spirit that college students of our generation studiously avoided in… Read More→

Posted in Second Hand Smoke | 2 Comments

Lent is Like Spring Training

With friends of the church calendar like this, who needs Presbyterian critics? Craig Higgins, a PCA pastor in Westchester, NY, wrote over at PCA Conversations (how did we miss this?) a couple of posts about the value of observing Lent. In the first, he gave two main reasons. The second was that Lent is part… Read More→

Posted in Shock and Awe | 3 Comments

If the Bible Speaks to All of Life, Why Not the Confession?

I do not do Facebook, though I might sign up for MyFace. I am happily uninterested in Twitter, which as T. David Gordon has suggested, is what twits do. So using a blog to tell others about what I’m doing seems silly if not narcisistic. With those qualifications out of the way, a recent speaking… Read More→

Posted in Novus Ordo Seclorum, Shameless Selves Promotion, Wilderness Wanderings | 34 Comments

The Great Debate: Psalms vs. Hymns III

(From NTJ Jan 1997 and April 1997) From: Glenn Morangie To: T. Glen Livet Date: 9/3/96 3:21pm Subject: Psalmody -Reply -Reply Glen, Are you a ninny or what? How can you say that Reformed worship is not centered on the Word and then in the next sentence write, “God speaks to us and we speak… Read More→

Posted in Second Hand Smoke, Shock and Awe | 9 Comments

2K Food Fight?

Over at Heidelblog, Scott Clark takes some exception to the proposal at Old Life for a Bureau of Weaker Siblings. Among the points he makes, these are the most interesting: Hart mentions a natural law approach to resisting fornication (that the act of fornication is contrary to the creational intent of sex for procreation). This… Read More→

Posted in Christian politics, Wilderness Wanderings | Leave a comment

Booalism

Why is the idea of dualism so threatening to many contemporary Reformed Christians? To talk about two kingdoms or to introduce the idea of differences between sacred and common jurisdictions is apparently a concession to secularism and a denial of Christ’s Lordship over every square inch of created order. But in point of fact, a… Read More→

Posted in J. Gresham Machen, Novus Ordo Seclorum | 3 Comments

Why Should Lutherans Have All the Good Poetry?

“Seven Stanzas at Easter” (a meditation on 1 Corinthians 15) John Updike Make no mistake: if He rose at all it was as His body; if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle, the Church will fall. It was not as the flowers, each soft Spring recurrent; it was… Read More→

Posted in Miscellany | Leave a comment

Bureau of Weaker Siblings

Imagine the following scenario (not apparently one conceived by John Lennon): a hotel owner refuses to let out a room to couples whom he knows may engage in fornication, adultery or sodomy. The owner decides upon this policy out of his own Christian convictions. But the owner conducts his business in a civil polity that… Read More→

Posted in Christian politics, Wilderness Wanderings | 24 Comments