This will be the most important Presidential race of your lifetime. Since we have all been told this during every Presidential race: how can this be true? It is true for the same reason that “we live in perilous times” is always true. Any republic is in danger every time there is a transition in the chief executive. The rule of law is so fragile and our Republic has already experienced one near-death election (1860) and several close calls (1800,... Read more
Human history would be different if humans learned to find the people that know what God is doing and listened to those people. When you hear complaints about God failing to intervene in history remind yourself that He did speak, but our stupidity (masked as snobbery) kept us from hearing the truth. We tuned in to the charlatan with the microphone, not God’s man. My grandfather on my mother’s side, Earl Combs, was a good man, but not a famous... Read more
I am flying to Rivendell and that is a wonderful thing to write. As Christians decide whether to regroup and educate themeselves (the illuminated Rod Dreher) or charge into the fray (the courageous French family), we must remember how wonderful is the time in which we live. I thank God we face libertines, intellectually bankrupt New Atheists, and pagans makeup their religion as they go. We could be my grandparents challenged by Hitler, Stalin, the Great Depression and Mao. If... Read more
I think beauty is important and that too often Americans, particularly American Christians, do not value beauty enough. We sometimes act as if beauty were an extra that humanity could do without. Truth? We know we need truth. Goodness? We cannot have Heaven without goodness (even if the goodness is God’s). We forget that Heaven will be beautiful and nothing ugly can go into that City of God. There are truths that are expressed poorly. There are moral messages that... Read more
A wonderful thing about Christianity is that we are forbidden to stay in caves of solitude: Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching. We may not save the world when we meet and not every gathering will be super, but gather we must. Obviously, this verse refers to the Christian worship service, but I think there is a larger... Read more
Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings sums up my view about rampant industrialization and the despoiling of nature. Unfettered technological development is the sin of Saruman and only the bad hobbits like the Sackville-Baggins want to progress for the sake of progress. Like many Christians, Tolkien captures my imagination when it comes to conservation this Wednesday of the second week of Pascha. Some call today “Earth Day” . . . though the Day itself strikes me as contrived and dominated by Wormtongue... Read more
Atheistic regimes killed millions in the last century. Nobody denies this fact, though some deny atheism had much to do with the murder. Religious people kill in the name of religion, so surely this is just an example of bad men, totalitarians, doing bad things who happened to be atheists? Yet there is decent reason to connect the atheism to the killing. Atheism as the dominant form of thought in a state correlates very neatly with mass murder. How could... Read more
Inauthenticity is the unpardonable sin of American college culture. Do as you will as long as you will it (and it doesn’t hurt someone. . . whatever that means). And yet there is something to be said for the “accidentally inauthentic” at least for the moment. We do not know ourselves, none of us, so all our Facebook, blogs, and work is more than a little inauthentic. One sign of a deeply disturbed person is that they do not see... Read more
How often do you get to hear from an inventive surgeon, a compassionate pastor, and a saint on religion and science? Yet there existed a man, Luke, who was both a distinguished physician and a doctor of souls. He lived well into the twentieth-century to see the horrors done by men who became atheists and sought the political and economic systems to justify their metaphysics. Wisdom! I will attend. As usual, the words of the Saint will appear in italics and... Read more
“I will love you no matter what” is a great Christian truth. God will love us “no matter what” even if our actions and choices force God to damn us to Hell. God does not desire the eternal misery of anybody, certainly not for making justifiable errors in belief, but He is no stalker. God will take our “no as no.” Love is absolute, but the response of love in a broken world is complicated. I have to be careful... Read more
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