Dear Microsoft, The Surface Book is a beautiful piece of hardware. The ability to function as a tablet and a laptop is marvelous and the hinge that allows me to use the extra battery in tablet mode is great. The beauty of the hardware tempted me to go back on a decision I made five years ago, but like the Damsel without Pity, your beauty hid a fatal flaw. This is my story. Five years ago when I said “good-bye”... Read more
Imagine an entire project turning on the appearance of bees. So it was when The Saint Constantine School defied history and planted a garden. Government schools show and tell, we decided to plant and grow. The theory is simple: we have too much show and too little do. We have too much tell and too little listen. What if college and kindergarten were all based on doing? Instead of borrowing money so you could pay someone for organized cheer, our goal was... Read more
Final Preface: the Constantine Strategy The World War II generation inherited the good and the bad of what the Civil War generation did. They made the nation better, but they too left problems in the renewed republic they created. Now the World War II generation is passing from the scene and change is coming. Change will come to the church and to the nation, because the World War II generation shaped both profoundly. Our goal is modest: do more good... Read more
It can get worse. Preface for those not reading Parts I, II, III Cultures die quickly when they die. Great Britain was Christian until in a single decade it was not. Unlike the metaphorical frogs in hot water, but very much like the real ones, a society recognizes building problems and reacts well. “High” (complex) cultures have many resources to respond and decay is never even. We are more sexually confused and rotten than in some periods of the past... Read more
Preface for Those Not Reading Part I and II Cultures must adapt to change or they die and the good news is that “high” (complex) cultures adapt well. Chinese culture has gone hundreds of years at a time without a major failure. But Chinese history also teaches us that sometimes the system collapses and one ends up with Mao. Moral errors, sins in the Biblical language, debase a nation and righteousness exalts it. Usually a culture or nation is a... Read more
Preface for Those Not Reading Part I Cultures generally muddle through their problems. If righteousness exalts a nation, injustice will debase the culture. Fortunately, advanced cultures generally balance out: decay in one area, improvement in another. Sometimes a culture blows it and ends up in a reboot situation. This is particularly true when in a period of rapid change combined with the passing of the founding generation. The American Civil War was one such era, the World War II... Read more
Of Frogs and Muddling Through Don’t put frogs in pots and turn up the heat. It is cruel, doesn’t say anything about cultural destruction, and is no way to produce tasty frog legs. Growing up, people said to me that cultures die because they slowly turn up the heat (a symbol for some kind of moral rot) until it is too late. Perhaps this image works for some culture somewhere, but I am hard pressed to name one. If one... Read more
My dad once told me (as dads should) that it was harder to be a good winner than a good loser. This was hard to believe since winning was so much more pleasant that losing. I started to understand what he meant the first soccer game I played in junior high school. We were a new school playing an established power. We were bad and they were good. They did not just beat us, they crushed us and kept scoring... Read more
Tonight I face an existential dilemma: the Packers are on opposite a Presidential debate. Sadly, this debate is meaningful since the Republican nominee has lost more Party support than any Republican since 1912. In other news, the Packers are under pressure to win, since the Vikings won today. Normal live blog rules apply. There is no editing . . . and the game is more unpredictable than the outcome of the debate. These two things are not equally important, but... Read more
Professor Wayne Grudem writes here about his previous assessment of Donald Trump to which I had responded here. Professor Grudem has modeled Christian charity, the ability to be candid when wrong, and by doing so has done all of us a favor. I hope I would do as well and will hold his noble example before my eyes as a reminder. Professor Grudem vindicates the assessment that he is a good man and a gentleman. Most of all, he has... Read more
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