The Democrat Party had a better stage and more excitement than the Republicans last night.
The Republican debate, set in the Reagan library, was backwards looking. The Democrat debate, at least the Obama side of it, looked young and energetic. All the style points go to the Obama-wing of the party over the Republicans.
On the other hand, the debate was between two candid...
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Winners:
Mike Huckabee is a great communicator with a sense of theater. He is also a nice guy. One of the most powerful images of the evening was a frail, but lovely Nancy Reagan leaning on Mr. Huckabee's arm. He looked every inch the Southern gentleman.
His answers caused every person in the room where I watched the debate to grow quiet. When asked about most people bei...
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My 1820 copy of the Book of Common Prayer of the United Church of England and Ireland reminds me that today is the anniversary of the execution of King Charles I. (It is also a lovely book and as usable today as then. . . the latter being something I doubt will be said of any bit of technology now in my office.)
Whatever his merits as secular ruler, killing Charles was a bad...
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Salvation, according to the Bible, comes from God’s self-giving. That’s pretty high-falutin’ theologizing, even if you leave the Trinitarian part out of it. But it’s also immediately relevant to our lives.
There is an evangelical spirituality which corresponds to the deeply personal nature of God’s self-giving. It is a spirituality that focuses relentlessly on G...
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Here is an analysis based, not on what I wish was true, but believe to be true in this Presidential race.
First, McCain is the only Republican with a clear path to the nomination.
He will probably be the Republican nominee. The race in Florida was not particularly tight. McCain won by five percent (at the time of my writing).
Republicans wishing to stop McCain must act...
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In the preface to Bernard Knox's book Oedipus at Thebes: Sophocles' Tragic Hero and His Time, he tells this story:
As an undergraduate at Cambridge I had been awestruck by a statement of Walter Headlam, a brilliant Cambridge scholar whose career was cut short by his early death at the age of forty-eight in 1908. He claimed that when embarking on the elucidation of a Greek ...
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Let’s go inside of the place Paul takes us in First Corinthians 2: secret wisdom only available through a Spirit who searches the deep things of God; a knowledge of God’s ways that is only possible if you have the mind of the Messiah. How far in to the deep things of God does this revelation through the Son and the Spirit go?
It’s sort of like asking how much does God...
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Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
I conclude this personal reflection series on beauty.
She Saw Him Well: Beauty and Granny
I must confess that loving love nearly destroyed me and hurt people around me. Beauty was in the eye of the beholder, me, making me a god, but I did not realize it. When my god failed me, I learned to hate myself and this began to breed cynicism toward...
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The gospel is good news because it is saving. Judgment day didn’t have to be good news, it could be very bad news for you. But it’s good because it brings three important things. Here’s a little Trinitarian sub-outline of the gospel:
A. It brings God as our Father. Not just God as the creator, or the generating matrix of all things that exist; that’s not what the...
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*Note: This post was adapted from an earlier essay.
On September 9, 2004 I was reading the Seattle Times before boarding my flight back to California. The lead editorial caught my eye: “A Nation Divided” by Joel Kotkin claimed that America is more divided than any time since the Civil War. And, while the division is not primarily political, it becomes fiercely evident...
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Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.
If I don’t trust God with my desires, then I can be cheated very easily.
Beauty doesn’t just sit there. It demands attention and a response. For me, like many men, women first made that obvious, but anything that is beautiful draws. We see beauty and are attracted to it, but attraction is not enough. Love demands more than romantic closeness....
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Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
Beauty Leads to Desire and Desire Can Lead to Absolute Romance
The opposite of my early disdain for aesthetic value is learning to accept beauty as real. I am surrounded by beauty all the time: the tree outside my office is beautiful, my wife is beautiful, and the art on my wall is beautiful. With a little bit of training, one can be awash in beauty...
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