Culture

This past February, Clearnote Church, Bloomington hosted our annual Shepherds Conference. This year our subject was "Not Ashamed: Ministry in a Post-Obergefell World." The entire world is talking about the beauty of this and that sexual perversion, so the pressures on Christians to join in the work of removing these sins' shame is intense. Will the church be ashamed of the shame God has attached to these sins, turning away from His words to join the gay pride parade?

So we had an idea: why not hold a conference that might be helpful to the saints in this evil day?

Click here to listen to the audio recordings. We pray that they will be strengthening to you.

NYT's David Brooks is so very precious about buggery. My friend Mark Albrecht forwarded a link to Brooks's latest piece dissing Rod Dreher's exquisitely titled "The Benedict Option" while flattering Dreher for writing the most important book on religion in ten years. He points out twice in his three-minute read that he disagrees with Dreher's opposition to buggery.

Noted.

Noted again.

Dreher thinks the inspiration for his book's title is the sixth century founder of the Benedictine monastic order who wrote...

Bloomberg reports:

The incoming Trump administration is considering moving White House press briefings out of the West Wing to accommodate more than the “Washington media elite,” President-elect Donald Trump’s press secretary said.

“This is about greater accessibility, more people in the process,” Sean Spicer said Sunday on Fox News Channel’s “Media Buzz.” Involving more people, including bloggers and others who aren’t from the mainstream media, “should be seen as a welcome change,” he said.

Bravo! I'm so tired of listening to mainstream media—including mainstream Christian media such as "World," "Gospel Coalition," "Desiring God," and "Christianity Today"—whine about blogs. I've seen these guys from the inside, working with and against them on national stories where I am in a position to know how and why they censor voices they don't like while promoting other voices that give them money.

Truth be told, "World" and "Christianity Today" need competition just as much as the "New York Times," the "Chicago Tribune," and Fox News.

After Trump's press conference this past week, I listened as Fox News's talking heads lamented having to keep tack of...

During the past couple of weeks, I've seen two news items showing our nation's sexual debauchery is about to reach even greater depths. The first was a report on the progress being mode on womb transplants. The second was an announcement earlier today that Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital has performed the nation's first penis transplant.

While I'm thankful this transplant will help a cancer patient, we'd all be fools to think...

The soulless creatures who have been the enforcers of the closing of the American mind for decades, now, all contracted the plague during their mandatory four-year service to the Academy we euphemistically refer to as "getting the college degree." If someone escapes the Academy with their thinking still free and their speaking truthful, the media can be trusted to finish the Academy's work.

When NPR needs someone to comment on the darkness of darkness above the Arctic Circle, it has to be a PhD. But when NPR needs someone to comment on the higher suicide rate among single men who are childless, it has to be a PhD then, too.

Even when NPR needs someone to explain why the Stupid Class is coming out in droves for Donald Trump, they'll get a PhD to do the explaining.

No kidding: even if NPR needs someone to explain...

NOTE: Son Taylor says I'm all wrong about this, and maybe I am. Read The Atlantic article (linked below in the original text of this post) and decide for yourself if they're right as they're wrong, if you know what I mean? Regardless, what a contrast this is to the Blessed Virgin Mary about whom I'm preaching this morning. So this additional material from The Atlantic:

And Rey proves herself to be, in extremely short order, extremely adept as a fighter. She is brave. She is smart. She is resourceful. She is a pilot of Soloian skill. She has a ninja-like command of a bow staff.

The plot of The Force Awakens, in fact, revolves around—relies on—Rey’s martial abilities. It also gently mocks the characters who would doubt those abilities. Finn, in particular, repeatedly attempts to inject chivalry into situations where chivalry is drastically out of place. During a fight the pair has against the First Order troopers, he runs over to Rey in an attempt to rescue her—only to realize that her attackers have already been neatly dispatched with. When Finn grabs her hand as they flee, she snaps, “I know how to run without you holding my hand.” (A few moments later: “Stop taking my hand!”) When Finn asks her, after another battle with intergalactic baddies, “Are you okay?” she shoots him a why-wouldn’t-I-be look. She replies, simply, “Yeah.”

They’re good jokes, but also loaded ones. Rey, after all, has been surviving all this time not just without her family—they left Jakku years ago, and she’s waiting for them to return—but also without, for the most part, a society. And extreme self-sufficiency has a way of putting social conventions into relief. The broader joke embedded in all these small ones is that all the stuff that makes for chivalry (and inequalities, and patriarchy, and if you stretch things only a teeny bit, maybe even gender itself) is itself extremely contingent. It would never occur to Rey that she would be in need of chivalry’s attentions. She has neither the luxury nor the burden of being a damsel in distress; she’s too busy surviving. She fights alongside men and women and droids, superficial matters of identity—clothing, appearance, even gender—all subsumed under bigger questions that come down to, basically: “Can you fight?”

Now, back to my original post:

Mary Lee and I went to see the first Star Wars movie back during our first year of marriage. It was OK, but nothing special.

(Snark removed.)

Still there's no arguing with success. The latest cleared $100,000,000 the first night. That plus they've updated their sexuality to fit our times, which of course means the latest product exchanges God's gift of heterosexuality for man's wickedness of homosexuality...

For God, who said, “Light shall shine out of darkness,” is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the Light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that the surpassing greatness of the power will be of God and not from ourselves...  - 2Corinthians 4:6, 7

Since the onslaught of multiculturalism, the humanities have been in a death spiral. What are the humanities? They are the disciplines that focus on human culture, including languages, philosophy, religion, music, theatre, history, law, and literature.

Last month in the New Criterion, Mark Bauerlein, an English prof at Emory, made an effort to to show why recent efforts to reverse the decline have failed. Rather than selling the great works of Western Civilization for their beauty and wisdom, they're being sold as a means to help men...

Yesterday I read an Acts 29 pastor's rebuke of a man for calling Christians in his church to turn away from their vain pursuits on social media, spending some of their bandwidth instead on expressing their Christian compassion for the unborn. The pastor said the usual things ordained men without conviction or faith would say to unordained men having both graces: the writer should wait until he had no sin to speak to others about sin; the writer is judgmental/Phariseeical; the writer is making abortion and Planned Parenthood into the only moral issue when there are lots of moral issues; the writer shouldn't exhort church members to speak against Planned Parenthood's sale of dead babies' body parts when those same members have shown their great Christian faith and witness by going on two-week jauntlets to foreign countries; and so on.

Abortion and Planned Parenthood will never end until pastors realize God will hold us accountable for our intensely defended indifference to the innocents being slaughtered down the street from our church-houses. It's no wonder simple Christians living under the authority of such pastors are silent about Planned Parenthood's murder of little babies. Add the R2K ridiculosity and the witches brew is vintaged finely.

Daughter Mrs. Benjamin (Michal) Crum wrote a reflection on the silence of Christians, taking on Lewis's artifice of speaking of these things from Screwtape's perspective. The title of her FB post is "Screwtape's Take on Current Events." Read it and post it yourself...

Feminists have been beating on the Fatherhood of God for quite some time now. Their hatred for God our Father has sunk so deep that fatherhood itself is seen as unnecessary, at best, or destructively oppressive, at worst. The sickness of our homes, our churches, and our culture can be tied back to this throwing off of God's Fatherhood and the corresponding fatherhood of men. It is nothing less than a rejection of all authority and a loss of the blessings that come with fatherhood: protection, governance, and love. Our daughters defend our country; our wives govern our homes; and our children rebel without any knowledge of the severe love of their father. The damage has been done, but our Father in heaven still rules. He makes things alive even and especially after they die. Such is our prayer for our homes, our churches, and our culture. 

To that end, please help us spread the word about A Conference on Fatherhood with Tim Bayly, September 25-26, at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Spartanburg, SC...

A Conference on Fatherhood with Tim Bayly

There is no higher calling for a man than to be a father, and yet we despise fatherhood. You, me, our culture—we don’t like dads. In fact, we hate them. We don’t ever want to be them. Where does that come from? How do we fix it? If there was ever a time to pray that the Lord would “return the hearts of fathers to their children,” it is now...