Month: May 2019

Every time I get a haircut the conversation invariably turns to theology. That’s because my barber knows I’m a retired pastor and, though not a church-goer, she’s more than a little curious about the whole Christianity thing.

The last time I was there she touched on the subject of judgment. We’re not supposed to judge, right? She walked right into a buzz saw on that one.

I explained that love is indeed the basis for Christianity, but that love hardly eliminates the need for judgment. In fact, just the opposite.  

If you fall in love, you’re not free to do whatever you please – or shouldn’t be. That’s because relationships make demands on us, just as being part of a family, a neighborhood, or even being a citizen does. If you truly love, you make every effort to ensure your behavior honors and respects the other. And this will require considerable disciple and sacrifice.

Continue reading “God-Talk in the Barber’s Chair”

The Oxford Dictionary defines an abstraction as “a general idea not based on any particular real person, thing or situation.” It is “the quality of dealing with ideas rather than events,” as “something which exists only as an idea.”

We live in a world of abstraction. Modernity, effectively begun with the Enlightenment, took thoughts and ideas distilled over vast periods of time – that is, traditions, social norms, cultural institutions, philosophy, literature, law, and religion – and abstracted them into free-floating, standalone concepts torn from the real-life communities that birthed them. They became orphans.

Concepts such as progress, freedom, autonomy, emancipation, pluralism, tolerance, openness, equality, and human rights, to name but a few, were cut off from their roots, i.e. Western tradition and its associated virtues and duties. These newly abstracted concepts then took on a preeminent role as sacred aims, alone capable of paving the way to a new, felicitous future.

Continue reading “And Another Thing…”

My parents were totally sold on college. From the earliest age I repeatedly heard how important it was to get into a good school. I remember the trips we would take every fall to attend football games at Amherst College (my father’s alma mater). It seemed magical somehow. The place had a certain mystique – austere and even noble – steeped as it was in tradition and the disciplined, hard-won pursuit of knowledge, wisdom, and truth.

Today, that luster is mostly gone, at least for me. I recently exchanged a few text messages with my oldest brother who also attended Amherst, much to my father’s delight. Yet our texts dealt mostly with the lunacy that’s overtaken the school and higher education in general, especially among elite institutions.

The issue at hand was a 36-page brochure, a true testament to strident political correctness, the “Amherst Common Language Guide,” created by the Orwellian-sounding Office of Diversity and Inclusion.

Continue reading “Banned from Middlebury”

Virtually no one today would deny that the Roman Catholic Church at the time of the Protestant Reformation was in need of reform. And that includes modern-day Catholics.

It is well known that the church had become overly involved in worldly matters, perhaps especially in politics. Bishops and archbishops served as princes and other such positions of power. They held vast amounts of wealth and owned large tracts of land. Their worldly power was considerable.

Not only that, a system of indulgences had developed where the faithful were urged to give money to the church in order to secure a fortuitous slot in heaven. To be crass about it, you literally could buy yourself out of Purgatory and straight into heaven.

Indeed, there were other issues, many theological in nature, far too extensive to detail here. But suffice it to say, there was considerable discontent within and without the church.

Continue reading “My Beef with the Reformation”