Category Archives: Religion

Authors, Religion

Doug Wilson Has Been a Problem for a Long Time

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Pastor and author Douglas Wilson has spilled a lot of words over his lifetime. He has probably been blogging since the 90s, and even without that, he has preached and published bags and bags of words. You could probably pick up any of his solo-authored books and agree with most of it, as you would with many other Christian books.

But Wilson has taken a few hard stands over the years and expressed a few opinions in hard ways. He sees himself as a leader of culture warriors, an anchor point in the middle of a carnival of chaos, catching the wildness of our society and throwing wildness back at it.

According to his piece, I am a “provocateur,” but remember that we live in a time when trigger warnings about everything are most necessary, and this means that we are surrounded by people who are easily provoked. Maybe that’s the real issue. Provocateur, eh? I’ll show you provocateur. Ready? Bruno shouldn’t be allowed to shower with the junior high girls. Buster Keaton shouldn’t have been put in charge of the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Men really shouldn’t have sex with unstable women. And there is plenty more where those came from.

Douglas Wilson, Theology Among the Deplorables | Blog & Mablog (dougwils.com), Oct. 13, 2021

I wouldn’t be writing about this if it weren’t for a piece that ran on September 28 on Vice.com. Vice isn’t my go-to for useful news or analysis, but there are too many details reported in this piece to dismiss it as creative writing. This isn’t a humanist simply finding ways to say how weird she finds those Moscow, Idaho-based Christians. This is a report of years of spiritual abuse by many members of Wilson’s congregation and affiliated networks.

In the blog post above, Wilson responds to some of it. He responded to at least one of the big stories in that article years ago; other issues are spelled out on a dedicated page. But these responses are beside the point.

If you read the Vice article–and I can’t recommend it because of the horrific details–you’ll see the problem is largely not Wilson’s particular actions but those of his congregants. Under his direction, they have left the Bride of Christ in the ditch in favor of a campaign against the lost and dying. They have become clanging symbols at best. At worst, they are going into the highways and byways not to invite whoever they find to the Master’s feast but to rob as highwaymen themselves.

Religion, Reviews, The Press

D. Keith Mano’s ‘Topless,’ reviewed by National Review

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Our friend Dave Lull recently sent me a link to a National Review article reviewing the late D. Keith Mano’s novel, Topless, which was released 30 years ago and is (like most of his work) out of print.

I hope it won’t be offensive to our readers to link to this review by Michael Washburn: Topless, a Noir Tragicomedy that Anticipated the Scandals of the Present.

Topless is the first-person account, in the form of diary entries, of a Nebraska-based Episcopal priest, Mike Wilson, who comes to New York after the death of a young woman named Rita and the disappearance of a man involved with her, who happened to run the Smoking Car, a strip joint in Queens. The man is Tony Wilson, Mike’s brother. How pitifully unprepared poor Mike is for the world — of exhibitionism, prostitution, alcohol, and drugs — in which his brother thrived….

If the concept sounds salacious, it is, but the book looks at all the sleaze with a Christian (if often distracted) eye. Tony Wilson knows from the beginning that he’s playing with fire, getting involved in his brother’s world. But he is full of rationalizations. In the end, what he discovers is as much about himself and his limitations as about the solution to the mystery. And there’s a biblical twist at the conclusion that I’ve never been able to get out of my mind.

As reading matter for Christians, I can’t wholeheartedly recommend the book (if you can find a copy). Author Mano, to the extent I understand him, struggled most of his life to find a Christian response to the sexual revolution, which seemed so overwhelming and permanent back in the ‘70s and ‘80s. (Little remains of it now, I’d say, thanks to Feminism and Wokeness, except for its contempt for marriage and its reverence for abortion.) I don’t think Mano ever really succeeded in his effort, even to his own satisfaction. The book does anticipate our own times in a way, as Washburn says, but in other ways it’s hopelessly stuck in a cultural moment now dead and buried.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Religion, Writing

Writing by Hand, Beastly Boy band, Blogroll, and Fear

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Paul Auster has written a biography on Stephen Crane and several other works without a word processor. He drafts by hand and types a paragraph with a typewriter (via Literary Saloon).

I have shelves of encyclopedias, foreign dictionaries, and all the reference books I use. And I must have five or six English dictionaries of various sizes and editions. I even have slang dictionaries. When I’m really stuck I look at a thesaurus, but it never helps me. I know all those words, but I always think, “Well, there’s one word I’m not remembering that would be better than the one I’m stuck on.”

City of Fear, by Alafair Burke, “a tight, pacy police procedural, in which three Indiana college girls hit New York for their spring break.” One of them doesn’t come back.

The Album of Dr. Moreau, by Daryl Gregory, “deliberately and imaginatively breaks every one of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Rules of Detective Fiction.'” It’s a crazy premise, a genetically engineered boy band who find their producer dead in his hotel room, that apparently works.

Martin Luther: How Luther helped my depression. “I somehow found myself holding a copy of a Luther biography written by Roland Bainton.”

Why should we fear the Lord when perfect love casts out fear?

Halloween meditation: Jesus defines hell as the place when everyone is “salted by fire.”

No matter what you call your church or church movement, I think you’ll go astray if you claim your side is the one breathing life into dead orthodoxy. The message of the Reformation is still needed.

Photo by Andrew Seaman on Unsplash

Authors, Religion

Keep Pilgrim’s Progress Humble

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Patrick Kurp notes that poet Charles Lamb wasn’t necessarily a fan of new, polished editions of Pilgrim’s Progress. At least, he said he wasn’t.

Bunyan’s book, for Lamb, is a model of Christian humility, not to be decked out in finery. Instead, Lamb would “. . . reprint the old cuts in as homely but good a style as possible. The Vanity Fair, and the pilgrims there—the silly soothness in his setting out countenance—the Christian idiocy (in a good sense) of his admiration of the Shepherds on the Delectable Mountains . . .”

Reading, Religion

You Must Be Common afore You Be Oncommon

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Ronni Kurtz describes the encouragement he finds (along with Pip) in Great Expectations: Don’t long for a future time after you’ve studied and learned all the thing; be grateful for who you are today.

Well, Pip, be it so, or be it son’t, you must be a common scholar afore you can be a oncommone one, I should hope! The king upon his throne, with his crown upon his ‘ed, can’t sit and write his acts of Parliament in print, without having begun, when he were a unpromoted Prince, with the alphabet–Ah! And begun at A too, and worked his way to Z.

Religion

Are We Safer Now Than 20 Years Ago?

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Twenty years ago on September 11, I worked in a cubicle-divided office, starting an uneventful day. One of us, I think my boss, must have checked the news or perhaps got word from family that there had been an attack at the World Trade Center in New York City. I don’t remember that we were aware of the first plane hitting the tower while it was still considered an accident.

We went into the conference room and watched the live broadcast of the burning buildings. I think the second plane hit the tower, but I did not see it. I think I was unable to accept what was happening. Someone said the building would fall or could fall, and I remember saying, “No, that couldn’t happen.” Then it did.

I want to say that the boss sent us all home, but I don’t remember. I don’t remember how the rest of the day went. My children weren’t old enough to know what airplanes or New York City were, and I don’t remember if my wife knew anything about it before I got home.

It’s been 20 years since terrorists attacked New York City with hijacked planes. World News Group’s podcast, The World and Everything in It, has been talking about 9/11 and the Taliban all week. I recommend listening to each one of their 30 minute podcasts. Here are some highlights.

Are we safer now than we were before? With Afghanistan back in the hands of the Taliban, has anything changed? Yes. Many things have changed. Afghanistan is not the same country it was 20 years ago. We’re already seeing resistance to Taliban rule. Though some of our officials repeatedly try failed policies, thankfully they are not in ultimate control.

I think you and I would agree this battle is not primarily man-to-man. It is part of an ongoing spiritual battle. And Christians have never been more or less safe in the hands of the Almighty.

Glory to the Father!
Glory to the Son!
Glory to the Holy Ghost!

As it was in the beginning is now and every shall be, world without end. Amen.

Religion

In the shadow of Babel

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The Tower of Babel, painting by Alexander Mikhalchyk. Wikimedia Commons.

“For whoever finds me finds life and obtains favor from the LORD, but he who fails to find me injures himself; all who hate me love death.” (Proverbs 8:35-36, ESV)

“We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which furious party cries will be raised against anybody who says that cows have horns, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening the mob with the news that grass is green.” G. K. Chesterton

I wonder if Chesterton guessed that it would take no more than a century for his prophecy to come true. Today we do live in a world where the most obvious and fundamental things are denounced as falsehoods. (I blame this to some extent on our system of postgraduate education, which requires graduate students to gin up ever more bizarre ideas on which to base their theses.) Today you can get in trouble – lose your job if not your liberty – for saying that boys and girls are different. That men can’t bear children. That babies in the womb are human beings. That race is not a moral category. That America was founded on principles of liberty. That it’s better to live in a liberal democracy than under a Communist despotism. Or an Islamic despotism, for that matter.

I’ve thought a lot about that Proverbs quote up at the top, over the years. The statement comes from Wisdom itself, personified as a woman, who is depicted standing at the crossroads, on the high places, calling out, imploring people to become wise. But they won’t. There are lots of things shinier and more interesting around, things easier to obtain and more fun than wisdom. But the warning comes at the end like a hammer blow – “all who hate me love death.”

And we do love death. Abortion is liberation, in our minds. Young people confused about their gender must be surgically rendered infertile without delay, before they can ever reproduce (abortion in advance). Suffering is not to be endured – better just to help people die peacefully. And the suffering doesn’t have to be that great. There are countries where you can request and receive euthanasia for mere depression. Who are we do judge?

I think there are two great evils in any society. One is poverty – a very great evil which must be fought by all moral means. But the other is prosperity. Prosperity allows us to build a shield – a wall – a screen – between ourselves and the rubs and nuisances of real life. The digital world gives us an unprecedented opportunity to create our own environments, safe and free from any pain we don’t bring into them.

It’s very much like porn. We focus in on an idealized image, and skip all the inconvenience and humbling and discipline of real relationships. We can fashion a world to our own tastes, a world where we need no patience, or hope, or charity.

And it’s killing us. As I contemplate the possible fall of my civilization, I do so with fear. I am old and not very strong, and vulnerable. But I know that the demolition of our Babel may be the only thing (if the Lord tarries) that saves future generations.

Religion, Uncategorized

Delayed Olaf greetings

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I should have noted the Feast of Saint Olaf (Olav) of Norway yesterday. Or even better, the day before, so you’d be prepared to attend mass, as I’m sure you would have wished. Yesterday was Olaf’s feast day in the church calendar, July 29. However (as I mentioned in a book review a while back) I’ve been won over to the revisionist figure of August 31 for the actual date of Olaf’s death. So today will do.

Besides, I’m not all that fond of Olaf. Or of Olav, either.

The short video above invites you to visit the site of the battle, Stiklestad, near Trondheim (I had ancestors from nearby). However, just now you can’t go to Norway unless you’re willing to submit to a couple weeks’ quarantine. So I don’t really recommend it. The video suffers from the presence of short-haired Vikings, a current plague in the reenactment world. Also, I don’t think the scene of the battle was wooded. (You can’t actually stand where the battle occurred anymore, due to slippage of terrain a long time ago.) But the production values aren’t bad.

Tomorrow is my birthday (won’t tell you which one). And Sunday is a family reunion.

I’ll post on Monday, if I survive and avoid arrest.

Religion

Suffer the little children

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“The Last Judgment,” from The Small Passion, by Albrecht Durer, ca. 1510. Metropolitan Museum of Art, via Wikimedia Commons.

I had a theological idea the other day. It gave me great enjoyment when it occurred to me, but it also worried me. In 2,000 years of church history, I can’t be the first person to think about this, but I’ve never heard it discussed in these terms. Probably because the idea is fraught with danger. And I do care about orthodoxy.

One of the things that troubles me, in my long sleepless nights, is the thought of all the “wasted” people who’ve ever lived. Not wasted in the modern sense of being destroyed by alcohol or drugs. Wasted in the older sense – people simply thrown away. Discarded. The Gospel teaches us that there is nothing more precious than a human soul (think of the parable of the Lost Sheep). But uncounted millions of people have been born into slavery or peonage, worked without respite all their short lives, and then left to die… or killed. Like animals. Also, so many have died young, with no chance to live. Not to mention those aborted.

“What will the Lord do with such people at the Last Judgment?” I’ve often wondered.

And then I remembered an important Christian doctrine. It’s even in our creeds. The Resurrection of the Body. When I was a kid I thought that meant Christ’s resurrection, but it doesn’t. It refers to the resurrection of our bodies, the bodies of every human being who’s ever lived.

At the Last Judgment, every human who ever lived will get their bodies back.

And a picture came into my mind, of a great throng of those “wasted” children, crowded around the throne of Christ, who will do the judging according to Scripture.

I remembered that in the Old Testament, judgment doesn’t always mean condemnation. It also means the place where the poor can get justice against their oppressors.

And then the picture of Jesus surrounded by little children gave me a strong sense of peace.

I can’t make a doctrine out of it. It would be wrong to do that. Universalism must be resisted at all points.

But I feel good about this.

Religion

In China, A Christian in a Bad Church May Have No Options

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PastorZhang San writes, “As Christians living under a communist regime—the Chinese Communist Party was founded 100 years ago [Thursday] —there is a sense in which we are blessed. As Proverbs 30:8–9 says, ‘Give me neither poverty nor riches . . . lest I be full and deny you and say, “Who is the LORD?” or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God.’”

But churches hide from strangers to guard themselves against being reported to the state. If a believing family wanted to find more biblical teaching than they are receiving at their current church, they may not be able to find another congregation.

My Life as a Christian Under a Communist Regime