Month: September 2022
Alternatives to Culture War
One of the lines we have taken for a long time at Mere Orthodoxy is a skepticism about culture war strategies and motifs in Christian public speech and Christian political strategy. (This is one of the first pieces I wrote for...
The People Who Don’t Ask Questions
Jemar Tisby: How can a group of people be so certain about topics that are so complicated? How can they say with so much certainty, “The Bible says…” when so often their interpretations have led to injustice and oppression? The...
Nursing Fathers and the New Right
Eric Hutchinson first drew my attention to the suggestive description of the government as a “nursing father” in the 23rd chapter of the Westminster Confession. The phrase is in keeping with the Reformed tradition’s sensibilities about the fifth commandment, for...
Gray on Sociology
Gray: If Positivism is the chief source of the twentieth century’s most powerful secular religions it is partly through its impact on the social sciences. For Positivists, modernity is the transformation of the world by the use of scientific knowledge....
Schaeffer’s Legacy
I am a former L’Abri student. Every time I visit Rochester, MN, I make a point of visiting Dr. Schaeffer’s grave. He’s something of a spiritual grandfather to me. My most treasured book in my home library is a copy...
Charlie Dates on Trusting God
This’ll preach: The text says now Jesus asked them these questions to test them. He knew what he was gonna do. Jesus says ‘where can we buy bread that we may eat?’ You know what I think Jesus is looking...
Mark Sayers’s “Sin Chart”
From a recent Rebuilders episode: A frame for understanding how different belief systems see and interpret the world. First, five diagnostic questions: What is the purpose of life? What is sin? What is the world? What is its attitude toward...
CS Lewis on Political Idolatries
From Screwtape Letters: Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of the partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and...
Reading the Pan-Africanists: Julius Nyerere (II)
Continuing: The production of wealth, whether by primitive or modern methods, requires three things. First, land. God has given us the land, and it is from the land that we get the raw materials which we reshape to meet our...
Positivism and Universal Free Markets
Gray: The core of Logical Positivism was the development of a scientific worldview. Going further than Saint-Simon and Comte, the Logical Positivists declared that only the verifiable propositions of science have meaning: strictly speaking, religion, metaphysics and morality are nonsense....