Revelation 1:4: Grace to you and peace, from Him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven Spirits who are before His throne. What do we have when we have the Spirit? We have everything. This is no exaggeration. He is the sevenfold Spirit who works through the seven days of creation, and throughout the week of history. He is the Gift from the Father and the Son, the Gift above all gifts, the... Read more
John 7:37-39: Now on the last day of the feast, the great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, If any man is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, from his innermost being shall flow rivers of living water. But this he spoke of the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were to receive. If any man is thirsty, let Him come to me and... Read more
Pentecost is culturally invisible. There are no Whitsunday sales at the department stores, no gift-exchanges around lighted trees, no jolly elf, no crèches, no heart-warming Hollywood holiday films with Jimmy Stewart, no Bing Crosby crooning about rushing mighty winds. There are no eggs or bunnies either, no jelly beans or chocolate. Unfortunately, many churches follow suit, ignoring the Spirit. We dress our kids up as shepherds, as Mary and Joseph, for the annual Christmas pageant. We put them in armor... Read more
Hillaire Belloc concluded a 1927 debate with George Bernard Shaw with this: Our civilization Is built upon coal, Let us chant in rotation Our civilization That lump of damnation Without any soul Our civilization Is built upon coal. In a very few years It will float upon oil. Read more
In his 1836 book, Contrasts , architect, designer, and social critic A. W. Pugin contrasts Bentham’s “panopticon” (Foucaultian symbol of modern surveillance and the carceral society) with an idealized Gothic “Ancient Poor House.” In his recent book on medievalism in modern England, Michael Alexander notes that Pugin was one of the first to recognize the link between architectural and society, and that Pugin’s critique was advanced in various ways by Disreli, Ruskin, Dickens, Engels, Marx, and William Morris. And, in... Read more
Dispassionate he’s not. In his recent book on evolution and the “big questions,” David Stamos tried to show how evolution can answer all the big questions of existence, far better than ID, for sure. Intelligent design is not “genuine science” but instead “essentially mythological thinking masquerading in a lab coat. It is the attempt to take a way of thinking common to frightened and ignorant peoples living in pre-scientific societies [like, what, Africans ?], a way of thinking possibly rooted... Read more
I have some reservations about what Philip Bess means by “the sacred” and “response to the sacred,” but his applications to architecture are very intriguing ( Till We Have Build Jerusalem ; ISI, 2006). When people encounter “the sacred,” he says, they respond with sacrifice, prohibition, obedience. Architecture is one form of response to the sacred (altars built where theophanies take place, eg), and architecture as a response to the sacred embodies these values: Verticality, light and shadow as a... Read more
In his recent biography of Shakespeare, Bill Bryson quotes an anti-Stratfordian comment that contemporary documents never describe Shakespeare as an author. Bryson responds: “That is not even close to being so. In the Master of the Revels’ accounts for 1604-1605 – that is, the record of plays performed before the king, about as official a record as a record can be – Shakespeare is named seven times as the author of plays performed before James I. He is identified on... Read more
Jim Rogers of Texas A&M writes in response to my post on American priestcraft: [1] The dichotomy, “Enlightenment or evangelical” is a bit too pat for my taste, but then I tend to squint until I see shades of gray in what others see as the most black and white of situations. [2] On Anglicanism in colonial America : The appointment of an Anglican bishop was a big deal to the colonists, not only for “religious” reasons, but because the... Read more
The Spirit is the Spirit of love. He is the love-gift that binds the Father and Son, and is the love of God poured into our hearts. By one Spirit we are all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, slaves or free, male or female. Each of us is given a manifestation of the Spirit for the common good, to edify the church: One is given wisdom by the Spirit, another knowledge, another faith, another healing, prophecy, tongues,... Read more
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