Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
Ever since World War II, most Americans have taken for granted that we should have a strong military establishment befitting a world power. That wasn’t always the case; in fact, it took some serious reality checks to convince a critical mass of the American body politic that any substantial military establishment was even necessary. In …
Continue reading "Book Review: The USS Essex and the Birth of the American Navy"
One of the points that the late scholar Allan Bloom used to make is that Americans are no longer impacted by great books. Music, other cultural influences, yes, but books? I would have to confess that, much of the time, that was the case for me, too. But in the spring of my junior year …
Continue reading "Book Review: Dante's Divine Comedy (Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso)"
The last two years haven't been kind to Jim Wallis. First his man in the White House, Barack Obama, has spectacularly stumbled in his bid to reunify the country and get the economy going again (I don't think he was sincere about either, but that's another post). To use Sarah Palin's delightful phrase, that "hopey-changey …
One of the urgent questions that keeps coming up in the war with Islamic careerists is this: what is the similarity of the situation that lead up to the start of World War II? Are our leaders appeasers in the tradition of Neville Chamberlain, letting budding Hitlers like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have victory after victory until …
When I came back to the Chattanooga area from Dallas in the late 1970's, it was something of a culture shock, even though I had lived here before. (I recently met a young lady who was raised in the Dominican Republic and on Manhattan and came here, I can't imagine the culture shock for her!) …
The New York Times' Maureen Dowd's recent comments about the US having a nervous breakdown with the widespread reaction to Barack Obama, the "Ground Zero Mosque" controversy and the like makes me think of an era when the country had a real nervous breakdown: the 1970's. In the wake of the 1960's, with all of …
Continue reading "Book Review: Andreas Killen's 1973 Nervous Breakdown"
It's hard for some of us to contemplate, but any "traditional" student wandering around today's college campus--to say nothing of those coming up behind them--has no living memory of the Cold War. For Boomers, it's a different story: the Cold War, and its hot portions such as Vietnam, basically framed the world view of an …
Continue reading "Book Review: The Fifty Year Wound: The True Price of America's Cold War Victory"
History is, for Americans especially, a problematic business. There are those who want to transmit history, and others who want to redefine it. But for most people history is something that gets ignored. For Evangelicals, the common attitude that "between Apostles and us, people weren't saved" only makes matters worse. But the history of the …
Continue reading "Book Review: History: Think for Yourself About What Shaped the Church"
The subjects of evolution and creation are explosive ones, not only because of their scientific implications, but for their social and political ones as well. That's been the case since Darwin first set forth the theory. It is certainly true today; for all of their protestations about the desire to be "scientific," implementing whatever can …
Until, say, the 1960's, there was just about only one translation of the Bible into English that most Anglophone Christians used: the King James Bible (more properly referred to as the "Authorised Version.") Although newer translations--some derived from the AV, some not, like this one--were out there, it wasn't until then that lay people in …
Positive Infinity 