Memorial Day in West Virginia was about veterans or at least that is how I remember the day. I was too little to think of “days off.” Summer is a day off when you are a kid: the longest, sweetest day of all. A healthy fact about my childhood was that cemeteries were a living place. We went there often to decorate graves, to clean tombstones, and to walk. Graveyards are the novels of civilizations: The first time I went... Read more
Skepticism is a good tool in any thinking person’s toolbox. Anybody selling anything deserves a critical eye. Skepticism is a first line of defense against bad ideas and terrible used cars. Like any good tool, skepticism can be overused. If all you have is a screwdriver, then the temptation is to think everything a screw, but if you find a nail, then it cannot be screwed. You are. Skeptical attitudes misplaced can cause you to miss good ideas and excellent... Read more
I have come to praise John McCain, not to condemn him. May God grant him many years. Yet his book, The Restless Wave, is sad, mostly because the “good times, just causes, great fights” seem ancient history already. The valedictory is bitter while intending to be optimistic: scores settled with forced cheer. McCain helped win a Cold War and salvaged a misguided hot one. He says he had a good time. If so, it was long ago. There is nothing to... Read more
Faith and Proper Evidence* What does a Christian mean when he says he takes an idea “on faith?” What kind of evidence would count? When discussing reasonable faith with skeptic Michael Shermer, I pointed out that “faith” has a great many definitions, even inside of Christendom, because (like many common words) it is used in many different ways. To make a discussion about reasonable faith more difficult, epistemology, the field that deals with how**we can be reasonable, is highly contentious.... Read more
The great thing about smart friends is they remind you of things. A classics professor made an argument and a colleague who did not like the argument reminded me of Alcibiades: the bright, attractive, charming traitor who helped bring an end to the Golden Age of Athens. He was so good that he seemed necessary to many Athenians, but Alcibiades was a snare and a delusion. Put your trust in him and he would con you, betray you, and then send... Read more
Constantine the Great, like Plato, manages to make enemies on the atheist and religious fringe. When Abeka books and Dan Brown both get you wrong, you did something right. Like all historically significant men, Constantine made mistakes, committed sins, and caused harm. Like Winston Churchill with the Nazis and the Communists or Lincoln with the Union and slavery, Constantine is great, because he got the big issues right. No sane person would just do what he did in the past... Read more
Christian higher education is broken in ways that money will not fix. In fact, an infusion of cash into the present system would put off needed change and make the eventual transition to a better world more painful. We water down our Christian commitment hoping to get more students. We shrink the liberal arts core in an attempt to attract transfer students. We move away from full-time professors to part-time adjuncts. Education suffers. If we give the present system more... Read more
If you have a wedding, nothing is worse than the vows you wrote yourself, at least a decade later. If you have a funeral, words fail, unless you can turn to Cranmer or at least the Prayer Book. There is something odd, however, about a group repulsed by Prayer Book sexual morality keeping the language for weddings. There is a cultural failure in secularism ranging from atheism to progressive Christianity in producing much original art that endures and so such... Read more
Unless you are Stalin, Mao, or a few other people in history, nobody deserves to be called Hitler. He was very bad, not quite uniquely bad, but close. How bad? To call him monstrous is true, but he was no monster really. He was human and that should wake us up. When I was a boy, the men of the World War II generation told me what they got from the trials of Nazi leaders at Nuremberg was how (in... Read more
An odd thing about our times: it is hard to agree with authority, at least if you have a certain personality. Thinking for yourself is good (often), but if you think for yourself and happen to agree with the experts, authority, or those in power, then there is a problem. A critic can always question motives. Let’s take the simplest example: children and parents. When I was a boy, I had excellent parents. They taught me to read, wonder, and love. I... Read more
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