CLIMBING THE WALLS

When I was a kid, we often would travel to Pennsylvania during summer vacation. The reason is that my father’s ancestors had immigrated to Philadelphia in 1721, settling eventually near Reading. Generations lived in the area. And though my father was born in New York City and grew up mostly in Philadelphia, his mother’s sisters still lived in Bethlehem.

One of the things I remember most vividly about those trips was the lush green cornfields that seemed to stretch endlessly into the distance. It was quite a change from suburban Connecticut.

But the most extraordinary sight, hands down, had to be the Amish. We’d see them riding along the side of the road in their black horse-drawn buggies, impervious to the rush of traffic which, or so I imagined, zoomed around them with no small amount of annoyance, if not imperiousness.

How strange they looked, the men with long beards, suspenders, and large straw hats and the women in flowing dresses, mostly black, with white embroidered headdresses and matching white aprons tied around front. It seemed like a different planet.

Continue reading “East of Eden (Part II)”

Believe it or not, the photo above depicts not a fictional Hollywood supervillain but the real Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chair of the World Economic Forum, which meets, famously, every winter in the tony alpine resort village of Davos, Switzerland.

The gathering draws the world’s richest and most powerful elites – tech oligarchs, billionaires, media titans, celebrities, top corporate executives, heads of state, royalty, high governmental officials, central bankers, and representatives from prominent international non-governmental organizations (NGOs), including but not limited to the United Nations and the World Health Organization. The Pope has even been known to get into the act!

The days-long event also clogs up the local airport with carbon-spewing private jets, this despite the WEF’s constant apocalyptic harping about “climate change”!

Continue reading “Creepy”

Increasingly we live in a morally illiterate society. But how did we get here?

To review, we first rejected the church and its teachings, then the traditions of Western Civilization (both moral and philosophical), and finally the foundations of Enlightenment thought including reason and science (not to be confused with scientism).

It was decided that objective truth is false, thus the task of discerning reality was shifted to a newly fashioned, self-appointed clerisy who would disabuse America of its stuffy, outdated mores and replace them with new and improved ones.

Moreover, because the Enlightenment had failed in its quest to establish a moral basis for ethics apart from God, a new effort became necessary. Why? Because human beings are inherently moral, spiritual beings who require moral, spiritual authority.

Continue reading “The Church of Standard and Poor’s, Part III”

Having dispensed with Christianity and its moral precepts, followed in short order by the rejection of the Enlightenment’s insistence on reason and science, after, that is, the connection to the physical and spiritual worlds had been broken and the mind unmoored from tangible reality, the floodgates were opened to all sorts of speculative and experimental ideas and attitudes.

Foundational truths became, at best, quaint. What had seemed obvious was shown to be contrived and untrustworthy. ‘Reality’ consisted of arbitrary social constructs or mere convention. Time-honored insight into human nature and creation’s immutable laws no longer reflected eternal truth but transient, random arrangements intended mostly to benefit the powerful.

Thus began what Stephen Soukup, in The Dictatorship of Woke Capital, calls the “second stream” of American liberalism. The fate of the first, early progressivism, as we saw in Part I, had foundered on the altar of post-war skepticism.

Continue reading “The Church of Standard and Poor’s, Part II”

Nature abhors a vacuum. Thus, whenever human beings attempt to eliminate a set of moral precepts, there’s always another waiting in the wings.

I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb in suggesting that one of the defining, bedrock principles of early America was Judeo-Christian tradition. Of course, there were other streams of influence as well, not least British culture which served as the repository not only of Christianity but ancient Greek and Roman literature, philosophy, government, and law, each revised and refined over centuries by considered insight and lived experience. British culture embodied the best of Western Civilization.

One basic insight shared by Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome alike, undergirding the entire Western edifice, was the fact of flawed human nature.

Continue reading “The Church of Standard and Poor’s, Part I”

I hadn’t planned to discuss this topic, in part because I had another topic in mind but, more to the point, I’ve talked about it any number of times already.

I chose this subject because I’ve grown increasingly frustrated with the lack of any conversation about anything having to do with suffering, not just in Protestant circles but throughout the culture at large. It’s as if it’s a four-letter word. We simply will not talk about it.

Then again, suffering is as endemic to human existence as any other aspect of life. To avoid it seems unrealistic, if not absurd. As Christians, we ought to confront it head-on, knowing that God has a compassionate and redemptive response to the vagaries of every life.

Continue reading “Why Are Protestants So Afraid to Suffer?”

According to my WordPress dashboard, this is my 100^th post. I started the blog three years ago shortly after retiring from active ministry in December of 2017. I was looking for neither fame nor fortune (needless to say), much less notoriety. I simply wanted to keep my hand in things.

Over that time I’ve been afforded the opportunity to pontificate in ways I could not while still working as a pastor. I have the freedom, that is, to say things more openly without undue concern for offending anyone. I’ve also been able to express built-up frustrations about the past and present state of the church – no small thing.

The blog’s overall theme, the connection between Christianity and culture, has long been an interest of mine. I am reminded of a quote attributed to the great Swiss theologian, Karl Barth: “We must hold the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.”

Continue reading “Random Thoughts at 100”

One of the most annoying, yet oft-used phrases heard within my denomination is the ever popular: “Speak truth to power!” It also doesn’t help that it’s usually uttered with no small amount of self-congratulating sanctimony.

Yet despite this, and as a Christian, I actually agree with the phrase. Challenging the “strong” who exploit and oppress the “weak” and vulnerable is one of the central themes of biblical faith. Jesus, after all, was the preeminent “underdog,” as was both Israel and the early church.

So why am I so dismissive of a phrase with which I heartily agree?

Continue reading “Speak Truth to Power!”

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”