A child says ‘Thank God for my good dinner’. What can I say at seventy-five? ‘Thank God for my good life, and for all the love that has been given to me.’ When you are given women writers, excellent writers, you are not generally given the best selling writer who is a woman, because Agatha Christie, mayhaps the best selling author of all time, somehow (usually) does not count as a woman. She is too happy or too readable or... Read more
The Kennedy myth was always a fraud. Yet a very good book Camelots End reminds that at the bottom of the false fairy tale, the lies, the corruption were men. The book is sympathetic to both Jimmy Carter, who had no ability to be President, and Edward Kennedy, who was unfit for the Presidency, though damned by family history to run. That’s history, but pity is in order and the author, Jon Ward, has sympathy for his subjects, especially the Kennedy brothers.... Read more
This is a guest post by Dr. Eric Holloway. Dr. Eric Holloway received a solid grounding in classical education at the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University. Eric continued schooling to complete a MSc in Computer Science at the Air Force Institute of Technology and a PhD in Computer Engineering at Baylor University. ————————————– Thanks to the second amendment, the US media cannot (legally) engage in positive censorship. However, they can engage in negative censorship by choosing what not to... Read more
Does theological liberalism kill everything it touches pulling it into a theological captivity to secularism? Reading “Black Liberation Theology” and the impact this movement had on African-American Christianity strongly supports the idea. Was “Black Liberation Theology” able to harness the power of a still mostly Evangelical African-American church to do good (great temporal good) only to leave that church hollowed out for the future? Historical Reminder Nobody inherits or forms a theology, or any intellectual idea, in a void. Culture... Read more
The cross and the lynching tree are separated by nearly 2,000 years. Professor James H. Cone starts a must-read work with this fact and continues with the comparison. If you are my age, fifty-five at the time of writing, then your grandparents generation lived when the murder of an African-American was open and public spectacle. In its heyday, the lynching of black Americans was no secret. It was a public spectacle, often announced in advance in newspapers and over radios,... Read more
Joining a team can bring on a dull imagination. We start thinking within the team culture and understanding ‘those people’ only by our team’s hot takes. With our opposition, we drop mics, not dialog. The failure of a world class (liberal) theologian like Rienhold Niebuhr to support desegregating his church is a sad lesson of the limits of compassion and the power of white supremacy. Niebuhr was a socialist and perhaps that shows another limitation to theological liberalism. He had too much... Read more
When we limit beauty, we limit our ability to flourish as humans. A glory of the world God made is that beauty, objective beauty, is expressed in many different ways. One result of sin is an inability to see certain types of beauty. Merely seeing “common humanity” is not enough, we should be able to see the beauty in our fellow humans. Why? The beauty is real and failure to acknowledge reality is never a good idea. God has made... Read more
American Christian history has a powerful Reformed strain. Often other Christians, even those of us in the Orthodox Church, react to the Reformed American story and so it benefits us to know it. After all, most Americans have been and are some sort of Christian and our first intellectuals, men like Jonathan Edwards, were Reformed. Thabiti M. Anyabwile is a Reformed Christian, very much so, and he sketches a history of African American theology from that perspective in The Decline... Read more
Want to be radical? Examine the worldview of Mary Weston Fordham as if it might be true. Fordham has the temerity to be the woman she wanted to be: African, American, Christian, Victorian. A great many Americans objected and still object to one or more of those characteristics. Mary Weston Fordham was brilliant at being herself against great odds. Booker T. Washington, also out of fashion, commended her work and she kept on writing poetry of the sort Victorian people,... Read more
People trained to know tell me Beloved by Toni Morrison is a classic. When creating a “must read” canon of Twentieth Century literature in English, the book makes the cut (and such choices are hard) in department after department. I will not question that judgment here. First, the book is beautifully written. Take just this one sentence: “Not quite in a hurry, but losing no time, Sethe and Paul D climbed the white stairs.” I enjoyed copying the sentence, admiring... Read more
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