I am that age when all the music stars I grew up with are writing their biographies. The Aerosmith guys are giving it up and right now I am reading Bob Dylan’s biography. Pete Seeger is a good bit older than I am, but his life is now on PBS every week. And on it goes. For those who made it this far and didn’t burn out there are some interesting reads. While I was just listening to their music and enjoying the ride, they often were going through hell, tip-toeing across career high wire acts and sometime making some very courageous decisions.
Looking back has an attraction all its own. That’s one joy the younger do not have. It’s an unexpected treasure. No matter the pain or disappointment, there is so much good and beauty and mystery. I find God peeking around corners, showing up in places and events in the most unlikely ways, pushing me, inviting me, wooing me, revealing to me. My life has been mostly a God-thing. I take a lot of satisfaction in that. Not satisfaction with self. But satisfaction that transacting with Him has been my basic work. Once He came in the front door He never left and has since been going through all the rooms and closets, searching the attic and exploring the basement. When He disappears for a time, He still makes a racket, kicking boxes this way and that and shuffling the furniture. Sometimes He stays in one room for a while and we meet comfortably in our overstuffed chairs with after-dinner drinks. And then He simply wanders away just when I was getting used to the rhythm.Though I am the one who lives in the house called me, I think He is actually much more comfortable there than I am and knows His way around better.
Here it is. I looked for more but couldn’t find it.
What We Believe In:
The Inspiration of Scripture
The One True God
Jesus Christ
The Fall of Man
The Salvation of Man
The Holy Spirit
Sanctification
The Church
The Ordinances of The Church
I am not sure what it means to say that you believe in the church or the ordinances of the church. One way or another this is an easier read than the 850 page catechism of the Roman Catholic church.
I have been a fan of national health insurance. It has seemed absurd to me to base health insurance on place of employment and the happenstances of the market place. A civilized culture should be less ruthless about its health care than ours seems to be. Conscience and decency demand better.
But the fly in the ointment is that government monopolies don’t innovate. Profit seekers do. What is true about other goods and services in a capatilistic society is also true when it comes to health care – the profit motive will yield the most good for the most people. This is an undeniable empirical fact.
Our future experience in health care will depend in large measure on keeping the profit motive at the core of health care.
I am no expert in this field, but I imagine that 80% of all the health issues we face are rather routine and managable. We do not need a doctor making $300,ooo a year taking care of us in such cases. Nurse practictioners are more than capable of handling the vast majority of our health needs. It is that 20% that needs attention and for us to receive the excellent care we desire, those doctors are going to have to paid handsomely for the expertise – the research, the development of procedures and protocols, the tools, the diagnostic equipment. These are things that are not going to get done if the profit motive is depressed. Of course, now many of the cures we consider routine were at one time cutting edge and the result of companies and individuals seeking profit. When that instinct is depressed we will find a parallel depression of quality of care.
That is the way it is. We can imagine another world in which this would not happen. But in this world it will happen. If we depend on altruism to get the job done, we are deluded. Anyone who is dealing with government knows that the mindset of performance is “no matter what I do, I will not lose my job and you must be satisfied with what I do” mentality. Do we expect this to change when it comes to health care?
Right here is where I want to live while I am on earth. My citizenship is in heaven and the Kingdom of God has my loyalties. But that does not make me blind to the benefits and blessings of Western civilization nor the commitment it deserves from people who mean to do well by their fellow man. This is not a popular thing to say in academia where such a statement defies the prevailing wisdom that no culture can be “better” than another culture. Underneath this denial is the assumption that there is no objective standard which is rooted in the transcendent and which can be discovered through rational discourse. It is exactly this which is the cancer of the college world.
The Politically Incorrect Guide( to Western Civilization to the rescue. It is written by Professor Anthony Esolen–one of the team-teachers of Providence College’s Development of Western Civilization Core Curriculum. (In my mind the companion volume to this book would be D James Kennedy’s What If Jesus Had Never Been Born, a thought experiment in imagining what western culture would look like had Jesus and his influence been stripped from the West).
This is what is written on the flap of the book.
Everything you should know–but PC professors won’t teach–about our Western heritage
Western civilization is the envy of the globe. It has given to the world universally accepted understandings of human rights (rooted in Judeo-Christian principles), created standards for art, music, and literature that have never been equaled, and originated political and social systems that have spread all across the planet.
Unfortunately, the fog of political correctness now obscures these and other truths about Western civilization. Leftists and Islamic jihadists find common cause in assailing Western “colonialism,” “imperialism,” and “racism” as its defining characteristics. Guilt-ridden Western leaders and public figures speak of their cultural patrimony in disparaging terms they would never dare to use about a non-Western culture. And in the academy, “multicultural”-minded professors flatter students into believing they have nothing really to learn from Sophocles or Shakespeare.
But now, Professor Anthony Esolen–one of the team-teachers of Providence College’s esteemed Development of Western Civilization Core Curriculum–has risen to the West’s defense. The Politically Incorrect Guide(TM) to Western Civilization takes on the prevailing liberal assumptions that make Western civilization the universal whipping boy for today’s global problems, and introduces you to the significant events, individuals, nations, ideas, and artistic achievements that make Western civilization the greatest the world has ever known.
Today–with the West imperiled as never before by the global jihad and threats from China and elsewhere–defending the West has become an urgent imperative: if we don’t value what we have and what we have inherited, we will surely lose it. The Politically Incorrect Guide(tm) to Western Civilization is an essential sourcebook for that defense.
I am finding that there are many in the evangelical church who have reached the critical point in cynicism when it comes to the value and blessings of Western culture. It is a cultural death wish. Preserving and developing our cultural heritage is a task worthy of the Christ-follower.
I am a true blue believer in the spiritual worldview. But I must admit that I like Michael Shermer. He is a skeptic about spiritual truth claims and confident that science can explain all human phenomena. His contributions to the video series, “The Question of God,” were significant and pointed. I like his style.
He has posted at his website a video that unwraps his Baloney Detection Kit, listing ten questions we must ask of every explanation offered to us.
I am enormously interested in the biological aspects of spirituality. The question is how much of what we describe as spiritual experience is actually biological phenomena. My response to that question is two-fold. One, much more than we have guessed. Two, how little science as we know it can explain human experience – love, worship, self-concious, the location of the connection between body and mind, etc.
The world I belong to is evangelicalism. It is my heritage, and I am emotionally comfortable with it. I am also an intellectual convert to its power of explanation. However, on a regular basis I am embarrassed by its credulity and susceptibility to views and explanations that are clearly off the wall. While it does not on a regular basis find the Virgin Mary showing up on grilled cheese sandwiches, it does flirt with marginal and extreme movements that are not grounded in serious thinking and rational analysis. There is an anti-intellectualism of which it is sometimes even proud.
But evangelicalism is capable of producing serious thinkers who do an admirable job of not only defending a spiritual worldview but a worldview that centers on the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. This brand of Chritianity has taught me not to fear the skeptic but welcome him in the conviction that whatever is true will be able to answer all questions posed to it. The more intelligent the questions asked, the more oportunity there is to deepen my faith in Jesus.
Jason Coker has posted thoughtfully about church as we know it. Every once in a while we open our eyes and see. And what we see is so uncomfortable we force our eyes shut again. But what if we kept our eyes open, open long enough to see where our looking would lead. Meig’s post is that kind of post.
I am not endorsing the responses proposed. But I am endorsing the looking and seeing.
Are you ready? I bet you’ve never heard this one before. “The God of the universe is crazy about you!” This is a description used to advertise the new book Crazy Love by Francis Chan. You would think Max Lucado already beat this phrase to death. But it has nine lives.
This is exactly the kind of expression that John Piper lives to kill. Yes, it is true, gloriously true. But it is true in a certain way, and it’s that certain way that does not get the press it deserves so that the phrase does not turn us into a bunch of spoiled children who whine at the drop of the hat about what we are not getting from God. I like the way Piper phrases it. God obeys the greatest commandment, to love the Lord God with heart, soul, strength and mind. God is not an idolator, setting his affection on that which is not infinitely worthy. Father loves Son, and Son the Father, and the Holy Spirit binds Father and Son together in love. The Father loves us in the Son and our love for the Father does not make us the center of the universe
While there are objections to Piper’s way of expressing this that need careful consideration, Piper has uncovered a stream of evangelical dissatisfaction with spiritual narcissism so rampant in the church. There is a swelling desire to sacrifice, to burn, to risk among us that asks nothing back from God other than the honor of giving all for him. CT Studd is the hero of such a kind of Christian.
Sorry, I can’t read another book that makes me the center of the world. I can’t take being that important.
I am using the book Learning to Chant the Psalms by Cynthia Bourgeault. It comes with a cd so that I can hear as well as read. There is some true simplicity to chanting and from where I sit right now there are some minor twists and turns that bring to the Psalms the mystical, the transcendent, the depth and the emotional power that rightly belongs to them.
Our church is readying itself for Compline services in the Fall and some instruction in chanting will be helpful. Chanting is a way to bring music back to the people since it does not require complex harmonization nor strong melody lines. Of course, this is just one way to sing unto the Lord but it has been a powerful way in the history of the church.
Phyllis Tickle, whose Divine Hours I used for fixed hour prayer writes of this book:
Few books ever manage to both inform and enthrall in equal measure the way this one does. The whole world of Christian spirituality owes Cynthia Boureault an enormous debt of gratitude for having us a classic.”
I’ll keep you posted. It’s an experiment in Christ-following.
DA Carson provides a useful overview of the issues in the justification debates. Click here. This article is twelve years old, but contemporary enough to be a guide for those working through the New Perspectives on Paul school of thought. Some will see this as useless nitpicking and be satisfied with a mere “Jesus saves” motto. But that will not do. See my post on GK Chesterton and the necessity of theological nitpicking to keep our faith from tipping over into immense errors. Christianity keeps in tension a whole host of truths, any one of which left to itself can work a terrible harm when not taught in conjunction with other necessary truths.
