The Theological Commons

Of likely interest to pastors, theological students, students of church history - and perhaps just about anyone - Justin Taylor directs us to the Theological Commons "digital library of 50,022 books on theology and religion" from the Princeton Theological Seminary.

I did a search for "Seventh Day Baptist" and it returned 634 results, the foremost of which were familiar titles by Corliss Fitz Randolph, A.H. Lewis, Albert Rogers, George B. Shaw, George B. Utter, etc. Obviously this was a rather specialized search related to my own interests and there is a vast amount of information made available here.

The major subject headings include Protestantism, Church History, Catholic Church, History, Theology, Bibles, New Testament, Philosophy, Missions, and Language and Literature. There are over 4,000 books from before 1800. Most of the books have a "Send to Kindle" link, and all of them a "View as PDF" download link. I haven't dug very deeply yet, but obviously this is another potentially useful - and free - online resource.

Theological Commons

"We don't know much..."

As an undergraduate, Christopher DeMuth tried to persuade James Q. Wilson to advise his senior thesis. Wilson declined to do so:

.... As the interview was winding up, I managed to work in a few impressive analogies between his books and the works of earlier political scientists. “That’s right,” he concluded cheerfully as he ushered me to the door. “We don’t know much in this business—but what we do know, we keep repeating.”

That, I would come to learn, was quintessential James Q. Wilson. It was agreeable (“that’s right” was one of his favorite openings), modest, plainspoken, and witty. But then one realized that he had said something important—in this case, crystallizing his realism about the capacities of social science and his conviction that the growth of knowledge is, at best, incremental and laborious. Even an undergraduate could play the J.K. Galbraith game—a sweeping, radical thesis, supported by a few clips from the New York Times and quips from Thorstein Veblen. The Wilson game was infinitely harder, demanding careful study and actual data from empirical measurement and field research, applied at just the right level of theoretical generalization for the problem at hand, to produce a small but confident improvement over what had been understood before. Wilson himself was engaged in numerous such games simultaneously, on subjects ranging from metropolitan development to party politics, from voting behavior to crime control, aiming to discover new knowledge that could help alleviate (he would never say solve) important social problems. ....

Christopher DeMuth, "A Gentleman and a Scholar," The Weekly Standard, March 19, 2012, pp. 25-26.

Impertinent and irrelevant inquiries

Once before I called attention to Tolkien's response to the inquiry from a prospective German publisher of The Hobbit asking for evidence of his "Aryan descent." Letters of Note has posted it in its entirety, along with the historical context. Apparently it isn't known whether this letter was actually sent.

Letters of Note: I have no ancestors of that gifted people

Of that day or hour no one knows

Joe Carter at The Gospel Coalition Blog provides an interesting and informative summary of "four general perspectives on eschatology":

• dispensational premillenialism
• historical premillenialism
• amillenialism
• postmillennialism

He explains the features of each, some variations on the themes, and identifies some of the personalities who identify with each interpretation.

On a not unrelated note, "Harold Camping apologizes for failed Rapture prediction":

Harold Camping, the Northern California preacher whose radio ministry spent millions of dollars last year predicting a fiery apocalypse that failed to materialize has apologized to his followers in an open letter, saying “we humbly acknowledge we were wrong” and “we have no new evidence pointing to another date for the end of the world.” ....

The cartoon was on Ray Ortlund's blog yesterday.

Jesus is Coming Back When? – The Gospel Coalition Blog, Harold Camping apologizes for failed Rapture prediction - latimes.com

Congregational singing

Jason Helopoulos, guest blogging for Kevin DeYoung, noting that one of the most contentious issues in the "worship wars" has been music, suggests some points about which everyone on every side ought to agree.

• Biblically Informed Words: Whatever we sing, it must be biblically informed. The song is Christian and meaningful in worship, because of the words sung. If the words are wrong and unbiblical then the song has no place in Christian worship.
• Theologically Profound Words: The songs we sing as a body before the throne of God should reflect the very nature of God, who He created us to be, and what He desires from us. We are to love the Lord with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength (Matt. 22:37). We are to worship Him in Spirit and in truth (John 4:23). The songs that we sing before Him should be filled with the glories of His truth and thus have an air of reverence about them. ....
• A Simple Tune: Some tunes are just too complex for corporate singing. They may be beautiful, but what good is it if everyone stops singing because they can’t sing it? ....
• But Not a Simplistic Tune: ....
• A Consistent Tune: A lament should sound like a lament. A song of thanksgiving should sound like thanksgiving. ....
• The People’s Voice Being Heard: Congregational singing is congregational singing. .... When God’s people sing “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs,” we should be able to hear God’s people sing “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.” The loudness of the instruments or the individuals/individual leading the congregation can actually drown out the voices of the congregation. ....

We may not agree on whether we should sing traditional hymns, psalms, contemporary hymns, praise songs, etc. We may disagree about whether congregational worship music should be accompanied by an organ, a piano, guitar, or praise band. But whether we love hymns or songs, traditional or contemporary, it seems like these above points are a starting place in determining what music should be at the center of our congregational singing. [more at the link]

Worship Wars–Proposing a Few Ground Rules – Kevin DeYoung

No free lunch

The issue, which has been obscured by the Limbaugh controversy, is not the availability of contraception — which nobody has advocated outlawing, or even limiting — but the freedom of those with a conscientious objection to it not to be implicated in its provision. Rick Esenberg argues that there is another reason contraception should not be insured:

.... Insurance, properly understood, is a hedge against risk. You pay something now to be covered against an expense that is extraordinary and unpredictable.

You don't insure against routine and ordinary expenses. Our auto insurance, for example, doesn't pay for gas and oil changes. We don't purchase grocery insurance. To do so would not be to buy insurance, but to simply buy the right to have someone else pay our bills. Moreover, as the expenses that we "insure" in this way become more routine and ordinary, the cost of the "insurance" will come to approximate what we'd pay for the goods or services in the absence of insurance — perhaps a little more since we have to compensate the party who we have contracted to pay them for us. There is no free lunch.

Contraception is closer to grocery insurance than it is to insurance against, say, getting cancer or being in a car wreck. Most people will need it for a significant part of their lives and the cost is not high relative to the other goods and services we must obtain. Ms. Fluke's estimate of $1000/yr seems to be wildly overstated and there are, of course, alternatives to birth control pills that are extremely inexpensive if somewhat less desirable. Regardless of religious liberty objections, the case for insuring against the cost of birth control pills is weak. At best and even in the context of a student health plan, it is a transfer of wealth from students who are not sexually active to those who are. The "fairness" in that is not self evident. ....

Mollie Hemingway on how the press has managed to almost completely avoid reporting on the central issue:

By way of introducing what I want to talk about, let’s look at something I read on the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page two days ago in “Bishop Dolan’s Liberty Letter: The Catholic Cardinal describes a chilling visit to the White House”:

The debate over the Obama Administration’s birth control mandate has been ingloriously fact-free, even more than usual. So amid demonstrably false claims about a plot to relegate women to the era of “Mad Men,” if not Salem, Massachusetts circa 1692, Cardinal Timothy Dolan’s letter on religious freedom deserves more readers.

“We have made it clear in no uncertain terms to the government that we are not at peace with its invasive attempt to curtail the religious freedom we cherish as Catholics and Americans,” the archbishop of New York wrote in a public epistle to Catholic bishops last Friday. It’s an eloquent and powerful document, though not one that received much of any media notice. “We did not ask for this fight, but we will not run from it,” he continues.

That this letter didn’t receive media notice is certainly true, even though it is defiant and accuses the White House of nothing less than asserting raw political power to achieve its goals. I mean, it’s juicy and salacious stuff, as far as these things go. But, you see, the media were too busy talking about really important things, like how to spin an unprecedented attack on religious liberty into something about Rush Limbaugh. Literally. And come on, what’s more important, the Constitution or talk radio? What’s more important, the way the White House treats religious liberty advocates or the way Rush Limbaugh treats abortion-rights activists? I think we all know the answer.

And so there was yet another media blackout of religious liberty activists. Today, I read a Religion News Service article headlined “White House insists contraception talks are on track.” Remember, it’s always about contraception, and never about abortifacients, sterilization, doctrine or religious liberty. .... [more]

Shark and Shepherd: Fluke and Limbaugh; Pills and Insurance, No such thing as free contraception » GetReligion

Let your light so shine...

Although directed to a Catholic audience, this advice from Father Robert Barron is perfectly appropriate for any believer (I've taken the liberty of substituting "Christian" for Father Barron's "Catholic" in these paragraphs.):

.... Many Christians-consciously or unconsciously-censor our own speech out of fear that interjecting religion into public discourse is offensive. To be sure, we should never be aggressive or overbearing in regards to our Faith, but we should never acquiesce to social conventions that require a privatization of our Faith either.

The Faith must be all pervasive, invading and influencing every dimension of our lives: public and private, personal and professional. Allow your Christian convictions to come to verbal expression. If this prompts a reaction or a question, so much better for the Church’s efforts at evangelization. How many people in your circle of acquaintances even know that you are a Christian? I would submit to you that if the answer to that question is few to none, then you are not accomplishing your mission.

Finally, don’t be afraid to pray in public. How many times have you sat down with your family or friends at a restaurant and simply dug into your food without offering a word of thanksgiving? Again, you need not be ostentatious, but a simple, unaffected prayer, publicly offered, can be a powerful witness to the culture. Do you remember that sentimental but effective painting by Norman Rockwell depicting an elderly woman and her grandchildren bowing their heads in prayer before taking a meal in a truck stop? What I’ve always loved are the looks of bewildered admiration on the faces of the regular denizens of the place. Don’t underestimate the evangelical power of demonstrating your faith in public. ....

Let's stop talking about evangelization and do it! :: Catholic News Agency (CNA)

Today in Madison

When I began my walk this afternoon the temperature was 57. When I got home about an hour later it was 63. Things are looking up. Tomorrow is predicted to be at least as pleasant. I walked around Monona Bay. The lake and the bay are still frozen but the ice fishermen have disappeared - they are wiser than I have sometimes credited them with being. If tomorrow is truly nice I'll hook up the hose and clean off the balcony.

The cellphone picture is from the southwest side of Monona Bay. The building where I live is one of the two light brown towers on the horizon toward the left side of the picture. I make my home in the one furthest left.

Keep Calm and Carry On

Via Denny Burk:

Eat thy bread with joy

Reviewing a new book, Kirk Leech argues that "moralism spoils the appetite":

.... Eating is one of life’s most enjoyable sensations. It’s fun and life-enhancing. Yet today, the pleasure of eating is increasingly weighed down with anxiety. Eating, once a relatively uncomplicated activity for many of us, has become laden with ethical and moral meaning and which has been tasked with grandiose political purpose. ....

.... For a growing number of people, making the correct moral food choice allows entry into a social complex of alternative production, distribution and consumption - farmers’ markets, organic lifestyles, co-ops, independent restaurants and stores. Moral consumption is seen as the keys to the door into a better society, a welcome change to the often dismal choices typically posed by environmentalism, which most of the time seems to ask people to give up things they like. ....

.... By viewing the acquisition and consumption of food as an ethical and moral act, we diminish the fundamental pleasure that eating food provides us. By attaching social worth and political meaning to what we eat, and hoping that consumption can make the world a better place, we will not only fail to improve the world, but in the process lose the essential fact that eating should be about enjoyment.

Eating should be seen as pleasure and not penance; something that brings happiness and joy rather than anxiety. ....

"Blessed are You, LORD, our God, King of the universe,

Who creates varieties of nourishment."

sp!ked review of books | Why moralism spoils the appetite

Being a Baptist

Via Denny Burk, Spurgeon on believers' baptism:

“If I thought it wrong to be a Baptist, I should give it up, and become what I believed to be right… If we could find infant baptism in the word of God, we should adopt it. It would help us out of a great difficulty, for it would take away from us that reproach which is attached to us,—that we are odd, and do not as other people do. But we have looked well through the Bible, and cannot find it, and do not believe that it is there; nor do we believe that others can find infant baptism in the Scriptures, unless they themselves first put it there.” (Charles Haddon Spurgeon, et al., The Autobiography of Charles H. Spurgeon, vol. 1 (Chicago: F.H. Revell, 1898), 155.)

More, from James Hamilton at The Gospel Coalition Blog

.... As a Baptist church, we believe that baptism is a matter of obedience. Jesus instructed his followers to baptize disciples (Matt 28:19), so we baptize those who have become disciples because we want to obey Jesus. We also believe that only believers are united to the body of Christ by faith (cf. Gal 3:26-28), so only believers should be welcomed as members into the visible expression of the body of Christ, the local church. If someone is not repenting of all known sin, trusting Christ for salvation, and submitting to all his commands and teaching, we don't welcome him or her into church membership. Since we view baptism as a matter of obedience, we understand unbaptized people to be disobedient on this point. ....

Baptists believe that those who have not been immersed in water as believers to symbolize their union with Christ by faith have not been baptized. Presbyterians and other paedobaptists think they have been baptized, even if they have not been immersed in water as believers.

John Bunyan agreed that baptism is the immersion of a believer in water but felt that he did not have the right to deny church membership to someone who gave evidence of regeneration and believed he had been baptized. William Kiffin's response was that he did not have the right to disregard, and thereby overrule, a command of Jesus.

As Baptists we're not denying that paedobaptists have a right to their own perspective, we are simply maintaining the integrity of our own convictions. Our consciences will not permit us to welcome into membership and communion those who have not obeyed Jesus at the point of baptism.

This is the whole reason there are Baptist churches at all. .... (more)

Denny Burk. Spurgeon on believers' baptism:, Baptism and Church Membership: Sometimes Obedience Results in Painful Separations – The Gospel Coalition Blog

275 years

Almost fifty years ago our parents deposited my brother and me in Shiloh, NJ, for the summer. Dad was attending classes that summer in Upper Montclair. Our uncle, Charles H. Bond, our mother's brother, was the Seventh Day Baptist pastor in Shiloh. His wife, Margaret Skaggs Bond, was our father's sister. So we spent the summer fraternizing, so to speak, with their sons, our double first cousins. And we worshiped at the Shiloh Seventh Day Baptist Church. Our Shiloh Bond cousins, Ron, Phil, and Tim, grew up in that church and are still members there.

I have vivid recollections of the sanctuary, which is still much the same, although there have been modifications to the exterior of the building. Today the denominational site calls attention to a significant upcoming anniversary for that church:

The Shiloh SDB Church, located in Shiloh, New Jersey, will be celebrating their 275th Anniversary.  To mark the significance of this celebration the members of the Shiloh Church will be signing the Church covenant on March 24, 2012.

A history of the Shiloh church indicates that the building in this picture was the third for the congregation, and dates back to 1850. It was gutted by fire in 1934 but was restored in time for the 200th anniversary.

Shiloh New Jersey SDB Church celebrates 275 Years! | Seventh Day Baptist | General Conference of the United States and Canada, History | Seventh Day Baptist Church of Shiloh, NJ

"Silly attacks on religiosity"

James Q. Wilson, from Dec. 24, 2004, on the incoherence of professing tolerance while attacking the liberties of those who profess faith. From "James Q. Wilson: Excerpts from His Writings in The Wall Street Journal":

Those who are alarmed by the extent of religious belief in this country have roused themselves to make the so-called wall of separation between church and state both higher and firmer.... They would be well advised to let matters alone. We have been a free country even though "In God We Trust" is printed on our dollar bills, even though sessions of Congress begin with a prayer, and even though chaplains paid for by our tax dollars are part of our military forces. Our freedom does not depend on eliminating these acknowledgments of the power of religion; it relies instead on the fact that for many generations we have embraced a secular government operating in a religious culture.

That embrace will be weakened, not strengthened, by silly attacks on religiosity, stimulating the spiritual to question the seriousness of people who profess a concern for civil liberties.

James Q. Wilson: Excerpts from His Writings in The Wall Street Journal - WSJ.com

"If morality is...nothing but convention or artifice...."

James Q. Wilson
1931-2012

James Q. Wilson died yesterday. He was one of the most distinguished political scientists of our age. It seems as though I have been reading him all of my adult life. He was a neoconservative in the original iteration of the label,* that is, primarily concerned with domestic social policy. Among a great many achievements, an article he co-wrote, "Broken Windows," effected a change in policing and criminal justice that made the urban world much safer.

John Podhoretz, at Commentary where Wilson often published, yesterday called attention to Wilson's "What Is Moral, and How Do We Know It?" An excerpt from early in that essay:

.... I am inclined to think that most people most of the time live lives of ordinary decency as they struggle to raise children, earn a living, and retain the respect of their friends. But we cannot dismiss the possibility that what many intellectuals have come to discredit some people will come to ignore. If morality is thought to be nothing but convention or artifice, then it will occur to those persons who are weakly attached to society and its rules that they are free to act as they wish provided they can get away with it. And if they would have broken the rules anyway, the relativism of our age makes it easier for them to justify their action by the claim that the rules are arbitrary enactments.

I wish to argue for an older view of human nature, one that assumes that people are naturally endowed with certain moral sentiments. We have a peculiar, fragile, but persistent disposition to make moral judgments, and we generally regard people who lack this disposition to be less than human. Despite our wars, crimes, envies, snobberies, fanaticisms, and persecutions, there is to be found a desire not only for praise but for praiseworthiness, for fair dealings as well as for good deals, for honor as well as for advantage. These desires become evident when we think disinterestedly about ourselves or others.

To say that there exists a natural moral sense (or, more accurately, several moral senses) is to say that there are aspects of our moral life that are universal, a statement that serious thinkers from Aristotle to Adam Smith had no trouble in accepting. In this view, cultural diversity, though vast, exotic, and bewildering, is not the whole story. In modern times, historians, philosophers, and anthropologists have sought for scientific evidence by which the existence of such universals could be proved; a few claim to have found it, but most feel that they have not. This has left most scholars skeptical about whether anything of universal significance can be said about our moral life. The box score has been something like this: Relativists 10, Universalists 1.

I am reckless enough to think that many conducting this search have looked in the wrong places for the wrong things because they have sought for universal rules rather than universal dispositions. It would be astonishing if many of the rules by which men lived were everywhere the same, since rules (or customs) reflect the adjustment of moral sensibilities to the realities of economic circumstances, social structures, and family systems. Hence one should not be surprised to find that the great variety of these conditions has produced an equally great variety in the rules by which they are regulated. Even so, some universal rules have been discovered: those against incest, for example, or against homicide in the absence of defined excusing conditions.

To find what is universal about human nature, we must look behind the rules and the circumstances that shape them to discover what fundamental dispositions, if any, animate them all in common. If such universal dispositions exist, we would expect them to be so obvious that travelers would either take them for granted or overlook them in preference to whatever is novel or exotic. .... [more]

Commentary has made available everything they published by James Q. Wilson, beginning in 1966. And here can be found all of the articles appearing in The Public Interest, also beginning in 1966. The most recent, contributing to a symposium: "Optimistic or Pessimistic About America: James Q. Wilson", was in the November 2011 Commentary. He refused to be either.

* "The view that we know less than we thought we knew about how to change the human condition came, in time, to be called neoconservatism. Many of the writers [for The Public Interest], myself included, disliked the term because we did not think we were conservative, neo or paleo. (I voted for John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey and worked in the latter's presidential campaign.) It would have been better if we had been called policy skeptics; that is, people who thought it was hard, though not impossible, to make useful and important changes in public policy." [WSJ, Sept. 21, 2009]

Sound theology

Via By Every Word:

The gospel according to St Jack

The current issue issue of National Review notes that "Santorum continued his sometime role of making perfectly defensible views seem ridiculous through overstatement." Another of this magazine's editorial paragraphs illustrates the point:

Having said that John F. Kennedy’s famous speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association made him want to “throw up,” Senator Rick Santorum was asked to defend his statement. “To say that people of faith have no role in the public square?” he replied. “You bet that makes you throw up.” Kennedy, he said, had argued that “only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case” and that “the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state,” and had promised not even to “consult with people of faith.” Santorum got Kennedy’s speech wrong; but Kennedy’s speech, however celebrated, got church-state relations wrong too. Kennedy suggested that Catholicism would, and should, have no influence on his public acts. (“I believe in a president whose religious views are his own private affair”—and, it turns out, whose religious views did not interfere with his private affairs.) Kennedy’s argument implies that religious people are welcome to participate in politics so long as they act as though they had no religion. It is an argument without much in the way of constitutional principle or historical American practice to recommend it, as indeed the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was contemporaneously proving. Santorum can justly be criticized for rhetorical inelegance and analytical imprecision, but his irreverence toward the Gospel according to Saint Jack is amply warranted.

National Review, March 19, 2012, p. 4.

The wisdom of Calvin and Hobbes

Edd McCracken gives us "Sixteen Things Calvin and Hobbes Said Better Than Anyone Else" (but I found the cartoon). For instance:

On expectations

Calvin: Everybody seeks happiness! Not me, though! That’s the difference between me and the rest of the world. Happiness isn’t good enough for me! I demand euphoria!

On the tragedy of hipsters
Calvin: The world bores you when you’re cool.

On looking yourself in the mirror
Hobbes: So the secret to good self-esteem is to lower your expectations to the point where they’re already met?

James Q. Wilson, who died today, in 1995 wrote "'Calvin and Hobbes' and the Moral Sense," from which:

Occasionally Calvin ponders what character may mean. As Christmas approaches, he knows he must be good for Santa Claus to deliver the countless presents (including a heat-seeking guided missile) that he covets. But, he wonders aloud, can he be thought truly good if he is good only to get the presents? "I mean, really, all I'm doing is saying that I can be bribed. Is that good enough, or do I have to be good in my heart and spirit?" But this brief insight quickly vanishes: "OK," he asks of Hobbes, "so exactly how good do you think I have to act?"

Sixteen Things Calvin and Hobbes Said Better Than Anyone Else | BOOK RIOT, 'CALVIN AND HOBBES' AND THE MORAL SENSE | The Weekly Standard

"Moved to heartier song...in the hands of a good organist"

Kevin DeYoung, in "Don’t Ditch the Organ," excerpts a couple of paragraphs by Harold Best, once Dean of the Conservatory of Music at Wheaton College, arguing that the proper use of the organ in Christian worship helps us to worship in song. An excerpt from the excerpt:

.... Without any doubt, the organ is the most naturally supportive instrument for singing that Western culture knows of. Its very design and its intelligent use in hymn singing are meant to accomplish one purpose: to support singing by the intelligent use of registers chosen to fill in the cracks–to provide both an underpinning and a blossom to the work of the congregational voices. The result is synergy: the whole greater than the sum of the parts. People are moved to heartier song without being overpowered or displaced, and their natural untrained voices are significantly validated and enhanced. True, there are those times when the organ soars above and beyond its normal collaborative task in the provision of free accompaniments and occasional iterations of brilliance and dash. But in the hands of a good organist, these should be reserved for those momentary or seasonal and festive times when clear hymnic water is turned into the polyphonies of rich wine. An organ does not have to be gargantuan to accomplish these tasks—not when it is well designed and properly played. (Exploring the Worship Spectrum: 6 Views, 73)

Don’t Ditch the Organ – Kevin DeYoung

"Be ye constant"

Today is St David's Day. It is the national day of Wales, the country from whence came some of my ancestors. Wikipedia explains who the man was:

Dewi Sant – St. David was born towards the end of the fifth century. He was a scion of the royal house of Ceredigion, and founded a Celtic monastic community at Glyn Rhosin (The Vale of Roses) on the western headland of Sir Benfro, at the spot where St. David's Cathedral stands today. David's fame as a teacher and ascetic spread throughout the Celtic world. His foundation at Glyn Rhosin became an important Christian shrine, and the most important centre in Wales. The date of Dewi Sant's death is recorded as 1 March, but the year is uncertain – possibly 588. As his tearful monks prepared for his death St David uttered these words: "Brothers be ye constant. The yoke which with single mind ye have taken, bear ye to the end; and whatsoever ye have seen with me and heard, keep and fulfill."

For centuries the first of March has been a national festival. St David was recognised as a national patron saint at the height of Welsh resistance to the Normans. ....

More, from James M. Kushiner at Touchstone Magazine:

We don't know a great deal about David, and while you will find the usual skeptical opinion—"he is so shrouded in legend and overlaid with later hagiography that maybe he never existed"—there is enough historical evidence to believe that he existed, that he taught in Wales, and that he made a mark that lasted and spread. (The earliest surviving reference to him may well be an early 7th-century inscription on a gravestone: "Here lies Idnert, the son of Jacob, who was killed defending the church of holy David from pillage.") ....

We see someone who takes the Gospel seriously, gives his or her entire life to living it and spreading it, counting themselves as servants of Jesus Christ, and a previously pagan society some years or generations later has become populated with churches, monasteries, scriptural knowledge, increasing literacy, with a downturn in things such as human sacrifice and infanticide. .... [more]

Re-posted from 2010.

Saint David's Day - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, Touchstone Magazine - Mere Comments: David of Wales

The intolerance of tolerance

I believe certain pastors in our neighbor to the north have already gotten in trouble with their government for teaching frankly about sin. Now homeschooling parents may. Does our First Amendment protect us from this sort of thing? From Mere Comments:

.... Under the revised Education Act of Alberta, all children will be “banned” from disrespecting people’s differences. The legislation requires that all schools “reflect the diverse nature and heritage of society in Alberta, promote understanding and respect for others and honour and respect the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Alberta Human Rights Act.”

According to press reports, Donna McColl, an official speaking on behalf of Alberta’s Education Minister, Thomas Lukaszuk, said “Whatever the nature of schooling—home school, private school, Catholic school—we do not tolerate disrespect for differences. You can affirm the family’s ideology in your family life, you just can’t do it as part of your educational study and instruction.” I think that it can be difficult to differentiate between family life and home schooling, and to understand the precise application of the word “disrespecting.” Doesn’t the mere act of disagreeing, or making statements that disagree with someone suggest disrespect for their views or acts?

But what is clear is that now in Alberta, homeschooling families will be forbidden from teaching that homosexual sex (or fornication, adultery, greed, idolatry, male prostitution, drunkenness, slander and financial dishonesty, as examples from I Corinthians 6:9) are sinful as part of the children’s schooling. ....

What if a priest or minister, or even a Sunday school teacher, would deign to suggest that the wages of sin is death, as St. Paul wrote. Obviously, this might make sinners feel uncomfortable. But perhaps before the government of Alberta issues any new laws regarding sermons or other school lessons, an important first step might be to change the name of Canada’s Charter of Rights and “Freedoms” to something far less Orwellian.

A Cold Wind on Liberty Blows from Alberta - Mere Comments