Ross Douthat Vs. Liberal Catholicism
Sometimes even I, Protestant though my bones be, wish for a pope—someone to solve all our hermeneutical difficulties and differences. In my favor, of course. But in exchange for the perfect unity a magisterial teaching authority would give us all, I would be willing to be found wrong a few times. Unity, however, is not what a pope actually provides. Conservative Catholics have all the problems conservative evangelicals do—worldliness, ignorance, and nominalism among themselves and liberalism...
The Just-So Story about Just-So Stories
We all view new ideas and experiences through our worldview lenses. Every time we turn around, Christians are explaining something through the lenses provided by the Bible, telling a story about God's goodness in our lives. Every time they turn around, believers in evolution are telling stories, too: just-so stories about various features of human life. So Michael Ruse, atheist philosopher, in the NYT a while back: I don’t deny substantive morality—you ought to return your library books on...
Excellent, Positive, Constructive Comment on what Conservatism Is
Roger Scruton: There is a kind of conservatism that sees all political questions as reducible to economics, with the free market as the ruling principle and the expansion of consumer choice as the only coherent political program. This way of looking at things can be taken a lot farther than at first sight appears. There is an economic justification, after all, for the traditional two-parent family, which produces well-adjusted children who are able to fend for themselves and make a positive...
“It Made My Body Feel Confused”
This GQ article on Carl Lentz and Hillsong NYC is enlightening. If the very definition of discernment is discriminating the good from the bad, let me start with the good: I watched the video and listened to Carl talk, and I liked a great deal of what I heard: biblical authority, the need for conversion, the sinfulness of sin, the importance of his family to his ministry. The camera caught him on stage actually reading Ephesians to a New York crowd of 8,000: "Among you there should be not even...
New York Times on Dressing for Success
Only science has the authority to tell us to dress differently than we want: For anyone who sees people as part of the job or wants to influence the behavior of others, the way we dress does matter. So let’s not kid ourselves. First, people judge us, at least in part, by how we dress. Second, what we wear affects how we feel about ourselves. Might this have any bearing on how we dress in church? When we’re getting ready to perform a task, a good deal of the work starts with putting ourselves...