“Can the liberties of anyone or any people or any nation be secure, when we have removed the conviction that those liberties are the gift of God?” Thomas Jefferson
Immediate Results and the Clock of Providence
“Let us be neither over-sanguine nor over-melancholy of immediate results. Our perspective of time is only slowly synchronized to the clock of providence.” Thomas Chalmers
Nathan Clark George’s Double Eleventary
Psalms 1. Alleluia! Sing for Joy—Psalm 33 2. Lord, Protect Your People—Psalm 14 3. Gently, Gently—Psalm 6 4. I Love You Lord—Psalm 18 5. Bless the Lord O My Soul—Psalm 104 6. O Lord Most High—Psalm 9 7. My Soul Waits—Psalm 62 8. Blessed Are All They—Psalm 1 9. Incarnate God—Psalm 91 10. Answer Father …
The End of the Beginning
And, we’re off: the final two days of the Uttermost Challenge with the whole FCS community running and biking at the Shelby Bottoms Greenway trailhead. We are less than $5000 away from our goal of $30,000 for the Chalmers Scholarship Fund. It is, of course, not the beginning of the end. Rather, to appropriate the inimitable phrase of Winston Churchill, it is …
Creed or Chaos
During the Second World War, the English woman of letters, Dorothy Sayers, gave a stunning address on the importance of doctrine. Published after the war as Creed or Chaos, the central argument of the book remains remarkably prescient: “Something is happening to us today, which has not happened for a very long time. We are waging a war of religion. …
Breaking News! Obama Believes Some Republicans May Be Decent!
As hard as it is to over look the horrific grammar in this sentence, it is harder still to overlook it’s horrific sentiment:“And as far as the budget goes, it’s time for responsible Republicans who share these goals — and there are a number of folks out there who I think are decent folks, I’ve got some disagreements with them …
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Throughout all of human history this is a truth that men have taken into account as they have dealt with one another, as they have conducted business, as they have passed laws, and as they have built civil societies. It is the first and most basic insight of both anthropology and sociology. Evil exists. It wrecks havoc on our best …
Robert Farrar Capon (1925-2013)
Robert Farrar Capon, a writer, thinker, pastor, and cook of extraordinary depth and insight, has gone home to be with the Lord. He said and did and wrote much, for which we can all be thankful. Perhaps the following (one of my favorite passages from his revelatory book, The Supper of the Lamb) will suffice to explain why: To raise a …
More Favorite Chestertonianisms
“There is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is a truism. “Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.’ “Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind, and therefore is congenial to it.” “Earnest Freethinkers need not worry themselves so much …
Doublethink and Doublespeak
In his brilliant dystopian novel, 1984, George Orwell perfectly and presciently described the kind of doublethink and doublespeak we have now come to expect of our modern politicians:“The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them, to tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and …
Rock of Ages
Augustus Montague Toplady, clergyman and writer, was born in 1740, at Farnham, about 20 miles southwest of Windsor, England. He studied at the prestigious Westminster School for a short time, but was sent to Ireland in 1755, the same year as his conversion—he had been greatly influenced by the teachings of John Wesley. Toplady received his degrees of Bachelor of …
A Moral Foreign Policy
When the esteemed Senate Majority Leader, Henry Cabot Lodge, addressed his colleagues on this day in 1919, the nation was already in the midst of a “Great Debate” over its future foreign policy. What was then called the Great War—what we call the First World War—had just ended. Should the country now join the new League of Nations that President …
Uttermost Progress: Week 6
I am now at or over the halfway mark for all three disciplines: run, bike, and swim. But, with the academic year getting underway this next week, the miles are going to be a lot harder to come by–simply because the time is going to be a lot harder to come by. Thankfully, I am just a bit ahead of …