Walter Russell Mead on the structural problems of the modern church: The Christian churches in the United States are in trouble for all the usual reasons — human sinfulness and selfishness, the temptations of life in an affluent society, doctrinal and moral controversies and uncertainties and on and on and on — but also and to a surprisingly large degree they are in trouble because they are trying to address the problems of the twenty first century with a business model... Read more
Disney’s Three Little Pigs may appear to be a simple story. But as Ellen Handler Spitz notes, it’s a model of Aristotelian aesthetics: The earliest versions of the Three Pigs story are buried in time, although we do have nineteenth-century English renderings of it. I want, as a foil, to consider Disney’s Silly Symphony animation, from 1932, with its refrain, “Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?,” frequently issued in print form and known worldwide, because it forms, like so much of Disney’s... Read more
Rick Ritchie argues that Bible-lovers should be bibliophiles: “. . . my call is not merely for Christians to read, but to read more, to read more broadly, to read more broadly together.” There are three stages in the history of God’s people which can be used to show three ways Christians can benefit from reading. Tradition itself is no infallible standard which can be imposed on the consciences of Christians, but if past practice can be shown to be reasonable,... Read more
Black Swan is a term and theory coined by Nassim Taleb that describes an unpredictable event whose effect is greatly disproportionate to its cause. Taleb outlines three criteria for such events: The event is a surprise (to the observer), the event has a major impact, and after the fact, the event is rationalized by hindsight, as if it had been expected. Some examples are the personal computer, World War I, and the September 11 attacks. Generally, the term Black Swan is... Read more
John Fea on how Christian belief in human sin could influence the work of historians: The historian Herbert Butterfield informed us that “if there is any region in which the bright empire of the theologians and the more murky territory of the historians happen to meet and overlap, we shall be likely to find it at those places where both types of thinkers have had to deal with human nature.” (Christianity and History, 1957). Marsden adds: “Of all traditional Christian... Read more
Over 10,000 different magazines will be published this year in the U.S. Of those, approximately 8,372 will have Lady Gaga and/or Barack Obama on the cover. Despite having an almost unlimited number of options to choose from, magazine publishers tend to recycle the same visual cliches for their cover art. Beautiful celebrities and not-so-pretty politicians stare out at us from every newsstand and supermarket checkout lines. But the New Yorker has managed—at a rate of 47 times per year for... Read more
1. Newbie Time Travelers Always Kill Hitler on Their First Trip 11/15/2104 At 14:52:28, FreedomFighter69 wrote: Reporting my first temporal excursion since joining IATT: have just returned from 1936 Berlin, having taken the place of one of Leni Riefenstahl’s cameramen and assassinated Adolf Hitler during the opening of the Olympic Games. Let a free world rejoice! At 14:57:44, SilverFox316 wrote: Back from 1936 Berlin; incapacitated FreedomFighter69 before he could pull his little stunt. Freedomfighter69, as you are a new member,... Read more
They are opposed to Obamacare, same-sex marriage, and the legalization of marijuana. They believe it’s important for a presidential candidate to have strong religious beliefs. They plan to vote for Mitt Romney. They are evangelicals. No surprises there, right? But consider one other factor: These are young evangelicals. Since 2007, the media has attempted to present young evangelicals in the Millennial generation (age 18-25) as increasingly liberal on social issues and more likely to vote for Democrats. But a new study... Read more
In his Pensees, Blaise Pascal wrote, “I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” Philosopher Peter Kreeft’s commentary on this passage is insightful and convicting (though it ends with a mixed metaphor that would make even Thomas Friedman cringe): We ought to have much more time, more leisure, than our ancestors did, because technology, which is the most obvious and radical difference between their lives and... Read more
Philosopher Brandon Watson looks at a group that treated ethics as a matter of practical living rather than as abstract theorizing: There have been times and places, however, in which ethics was taken seriously as philosophy—indeed, taken seriously as the philosophy, the area of most crucial importance—precisely insofar as it is practical. The era of the Desert Fathers was one of those. We don’t normally think of ethics or moral philosophy as a bunch of hermits praying in the wilderness. But if... Read more
Joe Carter
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