Treaders

Alma’s Mater

The violent hypocrisy of some “peace & justice” Christians is exposed by Southern Baptist Seminary dean and Touchstone senior editor Russell Moore.

When Jim Wallis advises pro-abortion politicians how to “neutralize” the life issue among religious voters— “neutralize” it, that is, without actually protecting the life and liberty of unborn Americans—he is playing a very old role in American politics: the political chaplain who claims divine sanction for a party’s existing policies.

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All Things Dark & Terrible

Russell D. Moore reflects on our fearful fascination with killer creation, ferocious beasts, and the glory of God.

Perhaps we are fascinated with all kinds of dangerous creatures—as evidenced by everything from children’s fairy tales to high-budget Hollywood vampire epics—because intuitively all people know that this is not the way life is meant to be. Even when we cannot verbalize it, we understand that there is an unseen enemy, a cosmic war. In our music, our artwork, and our literature, we all seem to recognize that in some sense, as Lewis put it, this universe is “enemy-occupied territory.” And this is true even when we disagree about the identity of the enemy.

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Benediction Fiction

Orthodox priest John Parker reflects on what is really behind inclusive public prayers.

To require a Christian priest to say little more at a benediction than “the Sustainer bids you to peacefully love your neighbor” or “May the Holy One be with you always” is effectively the same as asking a surgeon to say to a man dying on the operating table, “Don’t worry, everything is all right.” It is not a truthful word, and the dying man (and we are all dying men) needs the truthful word.

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Children of the Reformation

Family scholar Allan Carlson relates a short and surprising history of Protestantism and contraception.

In rejecting lifelong celibacy, in casting marriage as the highest order and calling on earth, in elevating motherhood and homemaking, in emphasizing the spiritual authority and practical tasks of fatherhood, in refocusing adult lives around the tasks of childrearing, in celebrating procreation and large families, and in condemning contraception, Luther implicitly laid a great burden on Protestant clerics.

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Nuclear Centers

As western civilization seems to be receding, history professor Eric Miller encourages readers to recover the centers that will hold firm.

By the mid-twentieth century, the West was in the final stages of the long and slow process of shifting, for whatever cohesion it still required, to another center, to what we might call, simply, a self-center. This was not a polity founded upon a broad (if unstable) consensus about a deity who creates and commands, but instead a polity devoted most fundamentally to a self that deserves and demands.

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Distant Neighbors

Homeschooling mother Amada Witt reminds us that as parents, we have to carefully walk the line between protecting the innocence of our children and teaching them about more difficult matters in life.

The seven-year-old had learned a new word. “Her mother is a lesbian!” he announced. At his dramatic announcement all the kids began talking at once, including my nine-year-old son, who had missed the whole interesting episode and now was torn between sharing his recently acquired knowledge of the birds and the bees, and obscuring said information for the sake of his younger brother.

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Simply Lewis

N. T. Wright, the Anglican Bishop of Durham, England, reflects on C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity after 60 years.

There are two constant powerful refrains throughout Mere Christianity. First, faith matters more than feelings; faithfulness to the high and hard standards of Christian behavior matters more than doing what you feel like at the time. Lewis was swimming against a strong tide of popular romantic existentialism, a tide running even more strongly in our own day.

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Harvard's End

As some of the more prestigious universities like Harvard seem to have lost their way, Phillip E. Johnson suggests looking to other educational models.

The problem is that Harvard has no vision of what an undergraduate education is for, beyond preparation for admission to graduate school. When the faculty last tried to reform the curriculum, they settled for an aimless plan that they hoped would pacify students while avoiding turf wars among themselves.

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Grave Signs

It is better for Christians to bury than to burn says senior editor Russell D. Moore.

A Christian burial seems, in this culture, more and more nonsensical: a waste of money, a waste of otherwise usable land, a waste, perhaps, even of emotion, as we try to “hold on to the past” and fail to “move through our grief and get on with life.” But if someone had asked any previous generation of Christians or of pagans if cremation were a Christian act, the answer would have seemed obvious to them, whether they were believers or infidels: Christians bury their dead.

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Rites & Wrongs of Passage

An Episcopal priest shows us what the Marine Corps remembers about ritual and solemnity that many churches have forgotten.

The care and dignity of the military rite put the Christian rites to shame. I don’t believe that the priest was intentionally irreverent or unprepared. But by comparison with the marines’ reverent ritual, the chapel service and the committal seemed slapdash.

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