Religion is Wasted on the Young

January 8, 2013 By Joe Carter

Timothy Larsen, a Wheaton College professor, contemplates the significance of childlike faith: Christ calls us to become like children again. Counterintuitively, part of what this might mean is that there comes a time to get over our mocking, knowing, puncturing phase and learn to be true grown-ups. This is the maturity that once again allows us to proclaim truth in all simplicity, to be like children. To say it another way, true grown-ups can parent. My students are often Christians who... Read more

Why Ancient Romans Never Dreamed of Being Video Game Designers

January 8, 2013 By Joe Carter

Many of the dream jobs of the 21st century, says Kevin Kelly, were created by the capabilities of our machines: Before we invented automobiles, air-conditioning, flatscreen video displays, and animated cartoons, no one living in ancient Rome wished they could watch cartoons while riding to Athens in climate-controlled comfort. Two hundred years ago not a single citizen of Shanghai would have told you that they would buy a tiny slab that allowed them to talk to faraway friends before they... Read more

After You Die They’ll Eat Potato Salad

January 8, 2013 By Joe Carter

From Albert Mohler’s new book Conviction to Lead, The: 25 Principles for Leadership that Matters: An old preacher . . . told a group of younger preachers to remember that they would die. ‘They are going to put you in a box,’ he said, ‘and put the box in the ground, and throw dirt on your face, and then go back to the church and eat potato salad. Read more

Pastors Who Didn’t Make the Cut

January 7, 2013 By Joe Carter

From a church search committee report: The following is a confidential report on several candidates being considered for our new Pastor. Adam: Good man but problems with his wife. Also one reference told of how his wife and he enjoy walking nude in the woods. Noah: Former pastorate of 120 years with not even one convert. Prone to unrealistic building projects. Abraham: Though the references reported wife-swapping, the facts seem to show he never slept with another man’s wife, but... Read more

What Flannery O’Connor Got Right About Epiphanies

January 7, 2013 By Joe Carter

Author Jim Shepard’s favorite passage from “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” highlights a sad truth: A moment of clarity only lasts a moment. Writers talk a lot about epiphanies—what O’Connor, in her Catholic tradition, called “grace”—in short stories. But I think we’re tyrannized by a misunderstanding of Joyce’s notion of the epiphany. That stories should toodle on their little track toward a moment where the characters understand something they didn’t understand before—and, at that moment, they’re transformed into... Read more

Apple Products Account for 14 Percent of All Crime in NYC

January 7, 2013 By Joe Carter

If you go to NYC, guard your iPhone carefully: The NYPD has released statistics that imply, basically, that Apple product theft makes up 14 percent of all reported crime in the city. It’s absurd and sad and sort of predictable but mostly just the sad and absurd. Apple products were reported stolen in NYC 11,447 times this year, from January 1 to September 23. That number is 40 percent higher than last year’s for the same period. It contrasts to... Read more

Naming the Just Barely Nameable

January 4, 2013 By Joe Carter

Theologian Fred Sanders on teaching the poetry of T.S. Eliot: [O]ne of the things we want poetry to do for us is to name an experience which hasn’t yet been named, or which has been laboring under a false name. We learn names easily enough for a certain range of experiences—chiefly the useful experiences that we want to be able to repeat on command—but for the rest of our lives we wander around encountering all sorts of phenomena which we... Read more

The Buried Church

January 4, 2013 By Joe Carter

In 1943, a volcano began growing out of a cornfield in San Juan Parangaricutiro, Michoacán, Mexico. It erupted for eight years, growing to a height of 336 meters and burying the town under layers of lava. The only building still visible amid the destruction is a church—half buried in the surrounding earth, half reaching for the heavens. A rather apt visual metaphor for our times . . . Read more

What Postmodern Ninja-Messiah Figures Fight For

January 3, 2013 By Joe Carter

The Catholic literary journal Dappled Things has an interesting interview with the critically-acclaimed science fiction writer (and Catholic convert from atheism) John C. Wright: Where films depart from the rules of objective moral order, they become merely silly. For example, there is a simply absurd scene in the thirdMatrix movie (I forget the name—Matrix Revisited? Matrix Rehashed? Matrix Regurgitated? Something like that) where Agent Smith, the Evil Secret Policeman of Evil, mocks and challenges hepcat ninja-Messiah Neo, asking him why he fights? Neo, being a hepcat... Read more

The Moral Character of Music

January 3, 2013 By Joe Carter

Does music shape not only our souls but the laws of a nation? Roger Scruton believes so: We know of music that is good-humoured, lascivious, gentle, bold, chaste, self-indulgent, sentimental, reserved, and generous: and all those words describe moral virtues and vices, which we are as little surprised to find in music as in human beings. Our ways of describing music give incontrovertible proof that we find moral significance in music—and it would be surprising if this were so and we... Read more