Seeing Todd’s post yesterday on adultery reminded me of a conversation I had on Sunday night. A student (the one who combines excellent taste in dating with an apparent reckless disregard for his own safety — hey, I'm still watching…
Four or five years ago, I pointed out that a certain well-known sociologist who had built his career railing against Moralistic Therapeutic Deism was reviewing his own books on Amazon and giving them five stars. I indicated that I was…
In reflecting on Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism after nearly a century, it is very clear that it is a work which presents in particular Christian form the pathologies of the modern age. In its prioritizing of experience and psychology, its…
Paul Helm dropped me a note to comment that, although it is true that we live in a world which fears exclusion, there are still many socially acceptable voluntary organization which do exclude people: political parties, for example. This is…
The third area where Machen anticipates the kind of dilemmas now faced by the contemporary church is in the matter of discipline. In a post-Freudian, post-Foucaultian world, the very notion of discipline sounds repressive and abusive, yet Machen clearly understood…
I recently had the pleasure of doing a double act with my old friend, Bruce Gordon, of Yale Divinity School, at the launch of the new journal, Unio cum Christo. Bruce's lecture (on Calvin and Bullinger) and mine on Benito…
On Monday, I offered some reflections on Machen's analysis of liberalism in terms of Philip Rieff's arguments about the rise of psychological man. Another theme in Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism is liberalism’s functional abandonment of history as a source of…
On the back of Todd's post yesterday, about Steven Furtick and the Southern Baptist Convention, there comes this from his friend, Perry Noble. In his essay on the Brumaire coup, Karl Marx quotes Hegel as saying that history repeats itself,…
As Aimee pointed out yesterday, the LORD does act on occasion to teach us a lesson and my confidence that having only biological sons would protect me from having to be in touch with my more tender emotions has proved…
To begin with a question: What would Gresham Machen think of the current state of the union with regard to sexual ethics and the connection between these and the increasing pressure on religious freedom? I suspect he would be shocked…
