TIME Magazine’s #6 cover of the year, the November 2nd New Yorker. Please don’t let me parent like this.
Why Require Unregenerate Children to Act Like They’re Good? →
Piper gives three affirmative reasons (with additional explanation and qualifications):
1) For children, external, unspiritual conformity to God’s commanded patterns of behavior is better than external, unspiritual non-conformity to those patterns of behavior.
2) Requiring obedience from children in conformity with God’s will confronts them with the meaning of sin in relation to God, the nature of their own depravity, and their need for inner transformation by the power of grace through the gospel of Christ.
3) The marks of devotion, civility, and manners (“please,” “thank you,” and good eye contact) are habits that, God willing, are filled later with grace and become more helpful ways of blessing others and expressing a humble heart.
Some People Are Just Too Easily Amazed →
A response to J.I. Packer’s interview in WORLD Magazine that included this comment:
I’m amazed at the amount of time people spend on the internet. I’m not against technology, but all tools should be used to their best advantage. We should be spending our time on things that have staying power, instead of on the latest thought of the latest blogger—and then moving on quickly to the next blogger. That makes us more superficial, not more thoughtful.
Choice quotes from the response:
J.I. and his ilk have not given to my generation a very compelling example of a serious world of letters. Had they done that, bloggers would not have an audience.
Blogging is not the problem. The problem is much, much larger than that.
Let us be serious for just a moment, shall we? If you leave us a world full of Dan Rathers, don’t be amazed to find bloggers; amazement is unbecoming.
The fault is not with the blogging, the fault is the deformed and flabby Evangelicalism you left us. The real problem is a superficial Christianity.
Blogging is very much the unflattering consequence of your negligence toward “things that have staying power”.
Ouch.
fan•tod
noun — [fan-tod]
definition: usually, fantods. a state or attack of uneasiness or unreasonableness, extreme nervousness or restlessness.
synonyms: the willies; the fidgets
example usage:
In my previous post on this, I got a little into the theological weirdness that is pervasive in this Twilight business. This time, I would like to explain why this whole phenomenon gives me the pastoral fantods.
Doug Wilson, Twilight Review #6
Lust is not a sin that afflicts one half of the human race, leaving the feminine half entirely unaffected. Because men are male and women female, because men are convex and women concave, their desires are correspondingly fitted to their natures. Men want what they want, and women want to be wanted that way. Men desire and women desire to be desired. This is a matter of emphasis, obviously. I am not saying that men don’t have a need to be desired, or that women don’t desire. These desires are both present in both sexes, and they are both weighted differently. And that weight is different enough to drive men and women into very different forms of personal destruction. Men destroy women very differently than women destroy men. But they both do it, and the recipients of these destructive powers are the hormones with feet that are currently frisking around them.
— Doug Wilson, Twilight #6
Criticism, Cheerleading, and Negativity →
Money quote:
The reason a person is critical of a thing is because he is passionate about that thing. In order to have a critical opinion, you have to love something enough to understand it, and then love it so much more that you want it to be better. Passion breeds critical thinking. It’s why criticism as an academic practice comes out of deep research and obsession, and why criticism as a cultural product comes from subject matter experts, often self-taught.
Study yourself to death, and then pray yourself alive again.
— Adam Clarke, quoted by Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students, 316
To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once. It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking. It showed not an exaggerated sensibility to sex but a curious insensibility to it. A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once. Polygamy is a lack of the realization of sex; it’s like a man plucking five pears in mere absence of mind.
— G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 103
