Disgruntled pro-life voters have decided to push for another primary candidate to express their displeasure with their choices in the next election. Said Bob Smith, leader of the Winning Isn't Everything Movement, "The current candidates just don't have the passion we are looking for in a nominee."
The group (WIEM) has decided to back Saint Lucy as their preferred president...
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How seriously should we take an author's intent while reading a book?
The answer is: very seriously, but his or her intent is not the only consideration in reading a text.
Evidently, this statement is easy to misunderstand.
In a student it often elicits (over the years) one of two immediate reactions. The first is a fairly harmless misunderstanding that is easy to cle...
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When J.K. Rowling announced that the Harry Potter books had intentional Christian images, I was getting ready to write on the topic. It was interesting to hear her thoughts, but she had already written seven books full of Christian images.
Her announcement added nothing to her books, but only confirmed that her use of such images was intentional, which any careful reader al...
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Recently, J.K. Rowling announced to the world that one of her characters, the heroic mentor of Harry Potter, Dumbledore was gay.
Nonsense. There is no evidence of it in the books and the books (at this point) are all that matter. I have always thought the books deeply Christian not because Rowling told me so (which she recently confirmed), but because the text is full of Ch...
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Featured Essay
Like all reasonable people everywhere, I always expected to be a super-hero when I grew up. I figured it was just a matter of time before my latent superpowers manifested themselves. But my sixteenth birthday came and went, no superpowers. My eighteenth birthday came and went, no superpowers. By that time, I would have settled for being bitten by a radioactive spider or b...
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The serious primary season is here.
Just as the pretenders in the NFL are playing for next year, so the political equivalents of the Dolphins, such as Sam Brownback, are dropping out of the race and sending their campaign's talent elsewhere. Now the silly season, when even Tom Tancredo could hear "Hail to the Chief" as he groomed, is over and the real game has begun.
Va...
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It's not exactly 36 Views of Mount Fuji, but this set of drawings by Phoebe Age Five does keep the viewer on the move. There is a dance between the human figure and the flowerpot that draws the viewer in. You realize that you are not just watching a person dance around a flower (which would be enough, wouldn't it?), but that your own point of view is being manipulated by the ...
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Faith is nothing. Really, it is. In fact, one way to ensure missing the gospel is to think faith is something. But it’s not. It’s really nothing at all. Faith is a negative concept that opens up space to speak about something else. It has what John Webster calls a ‘rhetoric of indication’, one which is ‘self-effacing’. In other words, faith couldn’t care less abou...
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The puritan Thomas Goodwin (1600-1679) wrote a breathtaking commentary on Ephesians: about a thousand dense pages that only cover up through chapter two, verse 11. Before launching into his exposition, Goodwin offers a few remarks about just how great the epistle to the Ephesians is.
He quotes Jerome's comment that Ephesians is "like the heart in the midst of the body," (...
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Richard Chenevix Trench (1807-1886) wrote a wise book on The Study of Words in 1851. Trench is excited about words, and keen to spread that excitement to his readers. "Words are living powers, are the vesture, yea, even the body, which thoughts weave for themselves," he says on the first page of this long love-letter to words. The words we use so easily are in fact "fossil p...
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Featured Essay
Webster defines a hypocrite as one who claims to accept certain moral standards that one doesn’t apply to one’s own views or behavior. For example, a person who says everyone should be a vegetarian and privately eats meat with every meal is a hypocrite. He doesn’t apply the same standards to himself that he applies to others.
Recent news coverage of Michael Vick’s ...
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