Month: January 2021

Shortly after visiting the United States in the early 1920s, British writer G.K. Chesterton famously remarked that “America is a nation with the soul of a church.” He was both impressed and appalled by the idea.

What he observed is that Americans often fail, consciously or unconsciously, to distinguish between church and state, denying their separate spheres. This despite the fact that the Bible unambiguously defines the church as wholly distinct from “the world,” even warning the faithful that the latter is under the power and control of Satan, no less!

A few years after Chesterton’s visit, in the fall of 1930, German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer arrived at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, arguably the foremost American seminary at the time.

Continue reading “Christian Realism”

There are certain words and phrases used by our political class that I find particularly irksome. For example, a few years ago I began noticing virtually every politician and talking head on TV news programs would preface their remarks with the word: “Look.” Where to I’m never quite sure.

But by far the most annoying phrase I’ve heard over the last few years, from both the Left and the Right, is this little gem: “We need to get to the bottom of this!” What makes this phrase specially grating is that we almost never get to the bottom of anything.

Then again, getting to the bottom of things ought to be our primary objective whenever we assess any issue of our day, despite, as I say, the fact that we never actually seem to. Instead, we indulge in surface analyses, mindlessly refusing to investigate life at its depths, life at its core, and refusing to get to the “bottom” of anything. We simply take things at face value.

Continue reading “Getting to the Bottom of It”