“All great stories are about longing,” a friend recently said to me. I immediately thought of The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, the classic book about the adventures of four animal friends: Mole, Rat, Badger, and Toad. Grahame’s tale is beautifully wrought, not only in richness of language, but in calling forth what […]
Archives
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God’s Whispers in The Wind in the Willows
24 Oct 2018
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As suggested in last week’s post, acrimony and ugliness continue to be the norm as the week progressed, unfortunately to include some comments in this blog. Predictably, those with preconceived biases in favor of or against Mr. Kavanaugh generally weighed in with moral cases that buttressed their positions. For those generally in favor of Mr. […]
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Deconstructing the “De-growth” Movement
20 Aug 2017
Tom Rogan in the Washington Examiner wrote a very interesting piece on the new expression of an old idea–”degrowth.” (see http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/the-far-left-has-an-idiotic-new-craze-reduce-economic-growth/article/2631274). He leads with these words: “Even the Soviets sought to maximize economic output. But today’s contemporary far-left are far bolder: they believe that economics itself is wrong.” He writes further, “From their perspective, government […]
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The Christian and Cultural Engagement
17 Aug 2017
Cultural engagement. What is it and how should Christians be “doing” it, assuming they should? And perhaps I shouldn’t even assume that. At any rate, I would like to explore the Christian in relation to his or her potential or real involvement in the political or cultural realms physically outside the church and apart from […]
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I happened to catch a couple of minutes of the Rush Limbaugh program, in which he was playing some snippets from an interview of Kurt Anderson and Charlie Rose on PBS, on the subject of Anderson’s new book, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire. The theme of the books seems to center on how conservative talk […]
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The Pew Research Center has released a study that shows Americans, especially more conservative Americans, are realizing that colleges and universities are, as the study states the most common answer, “have a negative effect on the country.” (see http://www.people-press.org/2017/07/10/sharp-partisan-divisions-in-views-of-national-institutions/) While overall 55% of respondents still believe institutions are higher education are valuable, the percentage has […]
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Sharia Law Protests: The Truth About Sharia
10 Jun 2017
It has been reported that today (June 19m 2017) has been set aside for protests around the nation against Sharia law, the legal system used in most Muslim countries to a greater or lesser extent. The principles for Sharia are derived from both the Quran and Hadith, the alleged sayings of Muhammed and have been […]
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Speech: Its Value and Its Limits
29 Apr 2017
Several incidents have occurred recently at American colleges and universities that raise the question of where freedom of speech is headed today. Now let’s be clear. Not all speech is morally acceptable if we are serious about our Biblical commitments. Private Christian universities have good reason sometimes to create conditions for edifying and pure expression […]
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Ted Poe, R-NC, and a House member of the Freedom Caucus, has quit the group, uttering these words among others: “saying no is easy, governing is hard.” This was in reference to the Caucus’s opposition to the American Health Care Act, which was pulled by Paul Ryan before a vote. Poe says he wants to […]
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The Core Problem of Common Core.
26 Mar 2017
I suppose it is time to write about Common Core again, in light of the recent withdrawal of a former Bush administration pro-Common Core staffer, Hanna Skandera, from consideration as an assistant secretary for the Department of Education. This blog is not about her specifically, though she is a member of one of the Common […]