Month: June 2020

We are creeping up on the Fourth of July again. It is, as we all know, our nation’s annual commemoration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia in 1776.

Over the years, I’ve come to reject the name given the ensuing conflict, “American Revolutionary War,” preferring the “American War of Independence” (to distinguish it from real revolutions like the one in France a few years later).

For, unlike the French Revolution, the Colonists did not intend to reject the basic insights of British culture, its values, morals, principles, or religion. Rather, it sought to confirm and strengthen them while eliminating what were perceived as corruptions of the existing British model.

Continue reading “Which Revolution Shall It Be?”

Since we’re still largely barred from attending church, I’ve used the opportunity to watch a number of services online, some altogether different from what I’m used to. To that end, I recently watched a curious, hipster-like Evangelical service on the World Wide Web.

Now, one of my longstanding critiques of Evangelicalism is its tendency to focus almost exclusively on the “Jesus and me” phenomenon. I sometimes get the impression that I’ve entered “Jesus World,” a hermetically sealed, bubble-like place largely disconnected from the world around it.

Whatever is going on, the message always seems the same: ignore what’s going on and focus on being saved; focus on your personal relationship with Jesus.

Continue reading “A Prevailing Social Vision”

A few days after New Year’s I visited a dentist who cheerfully announced how he thought 2020 had ‘a nice ring to it’ and that it no doubt would be a great year.

Oops.

Though I’ve never had any real interest in space travel, aside from cheering it on from the couch, I am now downright envious of those astronauts who recently, at supersonic speeds, were catapulted away from earth and into outer space. Oh, to be in orbit in the spring!

As a corollary to the cartoon above, I once saw one showing God, also with the requisite long white beard, sitting on a cloud, and pointing his TV remote at a distant earth frantically trying to change the channel.

Continue reading “Moral Confusion”