From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]: Covenant: 3. (Theol.) The promises of God as revealed in the Scriptures, conditioned on certain terms on the part of man, as obedience, repentance, faith, etc. [1913 Webster] I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for … [Read more…]
The web-site of New Scientist magazine has an interesting article on parasites and children with auto-immune diseases, but you can understand this blog-entry without reading that article. Investigations of third-world children with auto-immune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, have indicated that they sometimes do better against their diseases if they are infected with parasites. As … [Read more…]
Darwin is no problem to Christian thought. The facts gathered by biologists — including evolutionary biologists, geneticists, and brain-scientists — are themselves no problem. Certain thinkers, evolutionary biologists and so-called philosophers, have interpreted those facts in terms of a skepticism of a sort charitably described as reductionistic materialism. Such thinkers, as well as more rational … [Read more…]
In my various writings, I’ve not had a good thing to say about the welfare systems and social security systems of our modern age. I only want to write a short entry explaining the basic principle behind my opposition to welfare systems and social security systems. We are physical creatures, creatures who need food and … [Read more…]
This will be a short one and necessary only because there are so few who really care about ideas nowadays. We think in terms of policies, of immediate flows of cash and the resources which cash can buy in the modern world. And so it makes some limited sense in the context of our times … [Read more…]
We are all liberals and individualists nowadays, even those who pretend otherwise (forget the Amish for a few minutes, please). Our views of self and society lead us lead us to act according to a cowardly form of prudence. Let me take a quote from the 1913 Webster as found in the Collaborative International Dictionary … [Read more…]
In “To See a World in a Grain of Sand”, I noted that Melville thought Emerson and Thoreau to be morally insane — Hawthorne and Henry James, Sr. agreed. Melville noted in one place that the morality of those Cambridge sages was a spiritualized materialism that masked a total lack of charity, a total lack … [Read more…]
And so was Dante. Those of you who have read one of the good modern translations of “The Inferno” will know that the Pilgrim didn’t wander away from the road. The road curved away from him and he continued to go straight. We Christians have continued to walk on straight in our religious language, our … [Read more…]
I’ve made a tentative commitment to participate in the March for Life down in Washington in January of 2007. To be honest, I’m not going because I think it’s a worthwhile activity but only because it might be interesting. The Bible doesn’t tell us that we properly confront evil by putting on spectacles to amuse … [Read more…]