I love this book, brilliant if flawed. You should buy it and read it, but with a caution. This is not mostly a survey of philosophy, but when it is, the results are mixed. Pearcey makes a sound central argument: our culture has twisted apart body and soul and this is destroying us. When Pearcey does cultural analysis she is brilliant, but when she turns to the history of philosophy, the results are not as good. Not So Sound History of... Read more
This is a good year for hope: the virtue that aspires to more. Hope is a seed for faith. Faith is more substantial than hope and finds in reason and experience evidence for the unseen. Faith sometimes begins in hope, because in dark times evidence or positive experience can be hard to find. Hope is not merely wishing or fantasizing. If you hope you will grow wings and fly, then your delusions will always disappoint you. Hope is grounded in what we... Read more
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Houston is the American city of the twenty-first century. Forget what you think you know. We are a port city and one of the most diverse in the United States. We have a blue-state population with Christian family values and (of course) an innovative solution to college debt: classical, Christian college in Texas debt free. If you are not here, you should be if you can be, but there is a catch.* There is the weather, because something has to... Read more
Christians are everywhere and everywhere we are there is Christmas. I shan’t try to “do” global Christmas. First, lest I become like unfortunate mostly white choirs “doing” Go Tell it on the Mountain where the choir manages to loot and spoil simultaneously. This is easy for barbarians, but to be avoided by all good people. Second, while we all celebrate, we do so in particular ways and it is the particular that we should never forget. I will celebrate global Christmas.... Read more
She wrote a poem that became a carol, but do not limit Christina Rossetti. She more than Dickens is the Christmas writer you should read. I have been asked why I am a Christian, even though at one time I did not want to be. One reason is Rossetti who saw more clearly than most the horrors of a mechanized world and prevailed with humor, wit, and romance in avoiding it nearly altogether. She is the triumphant leader of those... Read more
We need to celebrate the full Twelve Days of Christmas, because Jesus was born of the Mother of God just as much on day six as day one! Read more
Christmas is the eternal coming into the temporal. Time passes, but Christmas endures unmovable forever. Jesus is Lord of Time, though not the Doctor Who kind. In His divine nature, He does not travel through time, but transcends the dimension. God sees all events that occur in our time-bound dimension simultaneously. As the Christian philosopher Boethius put it: “. . . so does He see all things in His eternal present.“* In His divine nature: “’God is eternal; in this judgment... Read more
We need to celebrate the full Twelve Days of Christmas, because Jesus was born of the Mother of God just as much on day six as day one! Read more
Happy fifth day of Christmas! You Should Know It’s Still Christmas. We are not yet half-way through Christmas and already I see people asking how Christmas was. This is one reason, I think, that people find jolliness, a simple version of joy, so hard. You cannot rest, consider, or even enjoy a great, good, splendid thing in one twenty-four hour period. Advent is a season of getting ready for Christmas and the secular world has an equivalent run up to... Read more
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