The Marriage Pledge and the Libertarian Solution to the Marriage Debate
Over at First Things the Revs. Christopher Seitz and Ephraim Radner have published a document called The Marriage Pledge. The gist of it can be summed up as follows: Therefore, in our roles as Christian ministers, we, the undersigned, commit ourselves...
The Evangelical Roots of the Benedict Option
In 1948 the Bible Presbyterian Church, a quasi-fundamentalist evangelical denomination, sent a 36-year-old pastor and his family to Europe to check on the state of the church after World War II. The family settled in Switzerland and worked mostly in...
Respectability and the Plausibility of Orthodoxy
One point that deserves special mention with the ongoing conversation about “respectable” Christianity concerns the plausibility of “orthodoxy” in the minds of many of our non-Christian neighbors. One of the unique challenges facing Christianity in the coming years is that the...
Should Sermons Be Published?
Today we live in a world where pastors of churches large and small post their sermons online almost immediately. Many live-stream and some churches even offer sophisticated viewing experiences allowing viewers to provide feedback. What’s more, the advent of smart...
3 Thoughts on Kindle Unlimited
I have a roundup on Amazon’s latest innovation over at Mere O Notes so if you’re wanting to learn more about Kindle Unlimited, start there. I. Our Technocratic Libertarianism While Mark Lilla is basically correct in saying that we live...
The Ethics of Jayber Crow
In The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry Anthony Esolen notes that Berry’s longest Port William novel, Jayber Crow, is in many ways a modern day retelling of Dante. Berry’s own language throughout the book suggests the comparison, as his narrator, the...
The Future of Protestantism Full Roundup
Normally this would go up over at Notes, but we wanted to be sure that everyone sees the full roundup of responses (so far) to last week’s Future of Protestantism event at Biola. There figure to be more responses in...
Tolkien and Violence
There’s a further Tolkien-related question that needs to be discussed after last week’s comments by George RR Martin, concerning the role of violence in Tolkien’s legendarium. Martin asked in the interview if Aragorn hunted down and killed all the orcs after...
On Church Membership and Theological Disagreement
“Port William repaid watching. I was always on the lookout for what would be revealed. Sometimes nothing would be, but sometimes I beheld astonishing sights.” The lesson from that quote (from Wendell Berry) is that fidelity to a place, a people,...
The Politics of Tolkien
In a recent interview with Rolling Stone George RR Martin had this to say about the differences between his work and that of JRR Tolkien. “A major concern in A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones is power. Almost everybody – except maybe Daenerys, across...