John Mark Reynolds on Faith and Culture
Today I have been married for twenty-six years. My memories of the event are hazy, soft-focus, not because I have yet become utterly senile and forgetful, but because my eyes teared up during the event and my contact lenses failed the saline assault. My vision of Hope is all soft-focus as a result like one [Read More...]
Some people are so interesting other people give them credit for witty things they did not say. Plato acquires fictive wisdom often, including in the Sarah Palin autobiography, where he is quoted as saying something he never said. G.K. Chesterton said many wise things and then said everything else in our minds. Only the worst [Read More...]
God is so good, He makes the necessary joyful. We must eat to live, but God encourages our eating by making it pleasurable. Children must learn not to eat only for pleasure, lest they retain immature palates or become slaves tot food. Gluttony is as deadly a sin any other lust. Healthy desire and licit [Read More...]
At nine or ten my pastor father (Father Father) talked to me about God and doubt. “I believe,” this honest man said, “but sometimes I doubt. Never be afraid of doubt.” I remember church services in West Virginia forty years ago when men born when William McKinley was an up and comer and there were [Read More...]
My Mother and I used to laugh at greeting cards that began: what is a x? No relationship was so sacred that a card couldn’t make it ludicrous. They were either so over the top, “a mother is an angel in suburbia,” or weirdly negative, “we have never talked much about feelings” that we avoided [Read More...]
There are no orcs in a real war. Humans fight and die in a war, not faceless Star Wars clones or robots…at least not yet. For this reason war is a fearful thing not to be fought lightly. Centuries of Christian teaching have labored to make war rarer, if it cannot disappear altogether, Christians have [Read More...]
From my London window, I see the problem of a border out of control and two parties unwilling to address it. From my home in California, I know decent men hounded by the government for a crime, illegal entry, committed years ago. The issue of illegal aliens in the United States is difficult for a [Read More...]
Verona is Juliet’s home in my mind. Romeo is there too, but Juliet! It is incidental to me that she did not exist and Shakespeare made it all up borrowing from several other sources. (Students: it is plagiarism unless you make it so much better people are honored you took their stuff.) So my problem [Read More...]
European history turns the mind to tyranny, especially in Germany, Austria, and Italy. Easy to condemn past tyrants, but hard to root out tyranny in parties, philosophies, or religions we favor. Easy for me to see the odium of political correctness on the Left, intolerance in secularism, and failures of Islam. Seeing my own tendencies [Read More...]
My greatest crimes against high culture are plain to all: Diet Coke, Disneyland, Packer football, and Styx. Hidden deeply away is a confession so terrible that I can only now admit it: I love musical theater and I adore the “Sound of Music.” I know I should think of Salzburg, on the rare chances I [Read More...]
John Mark Reynolds is the Provost of Houston Baptist University and is the author of Eidos. Click here to read more about John Mark.Follow Patheos on
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