Delusions of Grandeur – There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.

Leadership training is just Queer Studies for straight white guys.

“The same people who criticize Feminist Studies and Queer Studies for being fake also tend to treat Leadership as a serious academic matter, even though the trajectory and justification of Leadership is basically indistinguishable from every ‘Identity Studies’ major of the last thirty years. Leadership is just Queer Studies for straight white guys.” -from “LeadershipContinue reading “Leadership training is just Queer Studies for straight white guys.”

Ethics In Fiction

The standards we keep for fictional heroes are kept quite separate from the standards we hold for real people. For example, in The Two Towers, Gandalf refers to Grima as “Wormtongue,” even though “Wormtongue” is an abusive nickname assigned to Grima by all the people in Theoden’s court. While most Christian readers take deep satisfactionContinue reading “Ethics In Fiction”

Spring Sounds

I’ve been listening to this record for more than a decade, but I now firmly associate it with Spring. It was one of three or four records (along with A Soul Ascends and Brian Eno’s Neroli)I listened to every day right after the lockdown began. Tired Sounds of is a contemplative, chastened, immersive, immense, cautiouslyContinue reading “Spring Sounds”

Divine Justice

“[Subjects] want crimes to be punished, [citizens] want them prevented.” -Rousseau And why do subjects want crimes punished? Because a monarchy is an inherently religious form of government, and God Himself is far more concerned with punishing crimes than preventing them. God has relatively little interest in crime prevention.

Whatever Is Of Good Report

In the lengthy description St. Paul gives the Philippian church of those things worth thinking about, the most neglected, misunderstood, and ignored attribute is “whatever is of good report.” Classics are determined by a wide survey of history.

New Interview

Dean Abbott invited me on his podcast this week. You can hear the episode here.

Socrates/Homer/Peter Jackson

Socrates’ complaints about Homer are my complaints about Peter Jackson.

Trust Your Enemies

“A man usually has no idea what is being said about him. The entire town may be slandering him, but if he has no friends he will never hear of it.” -Balzac “If a friend tell thee a fault, imagine always that he telleth thee not the whole.” -Thomas Fuller

Black Friday: Strategy

There’s not a store on earth which has any incentive to actually stage their biggest sales on Black Friday or Cyber Monday anymore.

Unintended Telos

There is a sense in which German higher criticism is simply a reductio ad absurdum of historical-grammatical hermeneutics. The problem for those who depend entirely on historical-grammatical hermeneutics isn’t that higher criticism is wrong, but that it’s entirely possible within such a hermeneutical framework. In other words, the problem isn’t the assertions of higher criticism,Continue reading “Unintended Telos”