Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
Bossuet, in his History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches, I, 7, gets to the point: Justification is that grace which, remitting to us our sins, at the same time renders us agreeable to God. Till then, it had been believed that what wrought this effect proceeded indeed from God, but yet necessarily existed …
Continue reading "The Strange Consequence of Luther's Concept of Justification"
Certainly didn't for the Episcopal Church in their "recovery" of the San Joaquin diocese: What would you say of a trustee who spent $6.8 million of his trust fund's money to recover just $1 million? Is that a healthy example of how a fiduciary should carry out his duties? You probably already guessed before I …
Continue reading "Justification by Litigation Doesn't Work, Either"
Well, somewhat: What image springs to mind when you picture “federally subsidized housing”? Most people imagine a low-income public housing tower, a homeless shelter, or a shoddy apartment building. Nope—suburban homeowners are the single biggest recipient of housing subsidies. As a result, suburbs dominate housing in the United States. For decades, federal finance regulations incentivized single-family homes through …
Continue reading "The Tasteless Suburbs Were the Creation of the Government"
That's what's going on in Los Angeles' Boyle Heights neighbourhood: If “the revolution devours its own,” as the saying has it, then anti-gentrification activists in Boyle Heights, a heavily Latino district just east of downtown Los Angeles, have been feasting. They have greeted liberal artists and hipsters with racial taunts, vandalism, boycotts, and mask-wearing demonstrators. In several cases, they have …
Continue reading "Inside of Intersectionality is an Intersection Where Collisions Take Place"
One of the real shockers of recent American Christianity was the conversion of Hank Hannegraff, the "Bible Answer Man," to Greek Orthodoxy. That was upsetting to many who had followed his Bible answers for many years, but it was especially upsetting to the Reformed types, who basically acted like he had left Christianity. (That sounds …
Continue reading "Was Augustine Really the Worst for Christian Theology?"
As a follow-up to my earlier post, an interesting parallel to Barth's situation, with Luther's solution, from The Reformation: A Narrative History Related by Contemporary Observers and Participants: None the less the Lutheran territories suffered an incisive setback, foreshadowing worse things to come. In 1540 the political bulwark of Protestantism, Langrave Philipp of Hesse, became …
Continue reading "How Martin Luther Would Solve Karl Barth's Mistress Problem"
A live-in mistress with their family, Barth first: I just read a disturbing, I mean for me personally, earth-shatteringly disturbing essay by Christiane Tietz about Karl Barth entitled: Karl Barth and Charlotte von Kirschbaum. As most of us know, who have spent any amount of time with Barth’s theology, his “secretary”, Kirschbaum was rumored to …
Continue reading "What Karl Barth and Karl Marx Had in Common"
Positive Infinity 