As a privileged white male in one of the most affluent societies on Earth, I look around and I see that life is good. There is great food, great literature, great art. There is Beethoven and Bob Dylan, Cormac McCarthy and John Steinbeck, Van Gogh and Alex Grey. There are beautiful places, beautiful beaches, beautiful sunsets, beautiful [...]
In a recent post at Patrol Magazine about evangelicalism, the editors said that people need to “get over” evangelicalism. They cited such sources as the Evangelical Manifesto which I have also considered problematic since its inception. WorldNetDaily also has a “You’re not an evangelical if…” list. Evangelicalism is as fragmented as its Protestant foundation and [...]
Ignorance is the source of knowledge, silence is the source of noise, and stillness is the source of change. The emptiness of the future provides the possibility for movement. This is the principle of Taoism: preserving not only possibility, but the very possibility of possibilities. This impulse is conservative, but never at the expense of [...]
You’re in the Neoplatonic backseat,
so to speak, with that beard
you’ve been trying to grow for weeks.
You take up your glum tabby in your arms,
and stroke under his chin.
He teaches you how to worship God
in the sunlight
through the window blinds
and bats your hair, knocks loose
the dust, halo
around your head
in the afternoon dusk.
I like to listen sometimes
when [...]
On November 7th, former governor and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and governor Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania wrote an excellent article on the national park that is being created in Somerset, PA, to commemorate the heroic efforts of those on Flight 93, who decided to stand and fight against the Islamic terrorists flying their plane [...]
In the center of the village was a high black rock surrounded by pines, where every morning the sorcerer sang up the sun. He would climb there by steps cut into the stone long before his time and spread his red singing-cloth upon the ground. Then he would sit cross-legged and sing the song of [...]
With the current economic crisis, the recession, and doomsday prophets saying that the time is (for real this time!) now, what are we to think? We’ve witnessed general outcries against our banking system, globalism, and even capitalism. Most of these condemnations have come in the form of blogs, talk-shows, and protests. Some websites even devote [...]
As I pass the “en Espanol” section of Barnes & Noble, I can’t help feeling a little disappointed. No, I don’t have a problem with an aisle dedicated to Spanish texts; this isn’t based on xenophobia or a bulwark viewpoint on immigration. In fact, the opposite: what disappoints me is that this is the only [...]