Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
He's back in the saddle in Iraq, or at least working on it: On May 12, when Iraqis voted in the country’s latest parliamentary elections 15 years after the U.S. invasion, a new image of Sadr emerged: a smiling cleric with a snowy beard, holding up his ink-stained index finger after casting his ballot in …
Continue reading "Muqtada al-Sadr: Not a Reinvention After All"
This is Memorial Day weekend, when we as Americans remember those who gave their lives for our country. For me that turns back to my uncle, Don Gaston Shofner, and his sacrifice even before he could get to enemy skies. But that brings up another point: Gaston (as he was called in good Southern tradition) …
Continue reading "Bill Gothard’s Poison Pill for Southern Baptists"
He did the "Jericho March" around the White House last night: The Holy Spirit came a knocking for President Trump Thursday night ... in the form of royal wedding preacher Bishop Michael Curry. The standout star of Prince Harry and Meghan's big day was part of a candlelight vigil in the Capitol that included prayer …
But, when Christ came, he appeared as High Priest of that Better System which was established; and he entered through that nobler and more perfect 'Tabernacle,' not made by human hands--that is to say, not a part of this present creation. (Hebrews 9:11 TCNT) For the structures that are made by human hands (with a …
Continue reading "Build a House with 3D Printing? An Anglican Divine Shows the Way"
All of the blather we've been hearing about Presiding Bishop (not Archbishop) Michael Curry's sermon at the royal wedding last weekend obviously focuses attention not only on Curry and the duplicitous Justin Welby but on the Episcopal Church in general. I don't doubt that same church, faced with years of declining membership and self-inflicted litigation …
Continue reading "Why I’m in a Pentecostal Church and Not an Episcopal One"
The upside of that status was very much in evidence at the royal wedding yesterday, but every silver lining has a cloud. We've discussed this issue before. One normally expects the chief objectors to be Evangelicals, but this comes from the Anglo-Catholic Herbert Luckock's The Divine Liturgy: Every thoughtful ecclesiastical ruler recognises the absence of …
Continue reading "The Faustian Bargain of Being the State Church"
Matthew Stewart's account of his holidays certainly resonates with some of us: For about a week every year in my childhood, I was a member of one of America’s fading aristocracies. Sometimes around Christmas, more often on the Fourth of July, my family would take up residence at one of my grandparents’ country clubs in …
Continue reading "Laying Out American Inequality: The View from the Top"
Pliny, Letters 9.6: “I spent this entire time among my notes and books in the most pleasant repose. ‘How,’ you might ask, ‘could you do that in the city?’ The Circensian Games were on, and I am not attracted by that kind of spectacle in the least. There is nothing new, nothing interesting, nothing which …
Atlanta's Christian management guru is at it again, this time with the Old Testament: North Point Community Church Senior Pastor Andy Stanley has stated that Christians need to "unhitch" the Old Testament from their faith. In the final part of a recent sermon series, Stanley explained that while he believes that the Old Testament is "divinely …
Continue reading "What We Really Need to Do is to Unhitch @AndyStanley"
Like everything else, the Babylon Bee had fun with this: In a mathematics lesson delivered to her kindergarten class Tuesday, local teacher and closed-minded bigot Becky Delatorre reportedly insisted that two plus two equals four, all the time, to the exclusion of all other numbers, no matter how anyone feels about it. Well...we turn to …
Continue reading "Two Plus Two Equals Four Until You Redefine Addition"
Positive Infinity 