Recently in Faith Category
Repost: Susan Got What Was Coming To Her
"The evil attempting to ensorcel Susan is not dramatic. She doesn't murder babies (not even in the womb). She doesn't starve or whip innocent children. She's just an ordinary young woman, interested in ordinary things, like lipstick and nylons. So, obviously, missing out on Narnia? Maybe going to Hell? This is totally unfair, right?
"But what if it is not?
"St. John Bosco, a Catholic saint, once had a vision of Hell. To his horror, he saw young men he had taught burning there, boys whom he thought of as good and hard-working. One of the causes for this suffering, he was told, was idleness...they had drifted gently away from God, stopped praying, and fallen into gossip and laziness, and this spiritual laziness slowly wafted them away from Heaven.
"He found that being polite, respectful, and avoiding big sins was not enough...if they rejected grace, hid sin, or did not give their heart entirely to God....
"If you had gone to Narnia and you had been granted a gift that billions of people would have given their lives for--to walk with Aslan and see him in the flesh--and you let yourself be seduced by worldly things and forgot Aslan...
"If you turned away from good, in its papable leonine form, to scramble after evil, in its mundane, boring, just drifting away from good form...
...wouldn't you deserve what's coming to you?"
Why Is Pete Hegseth Purging Women From Command? Doug Wilson Is Why. - Mother Jones
This article is by a biased left-wing writer in a left-wing magazine, but nevertheless Doug Wilson, the founder of the modern classical education movement, and the community he has gathered in Moscow, Idaho, come across in a positive light.
A Christian philosopher's path to truth | WORLD
Douglas Groothuis writes: "Of the myriad books that have shaped my worldview, these four live in me. I have read them repeatedly and have taught them to university students over many years." The God Who Is There, by Francis Schaeffer; Pensées, by Blaise Pascal; The Abolition of Man, by C. S. Lewis; Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, by Neil Postman.
From the US Naval Academy Navigators resources page, a list of the verses and categories in the Nav's Topical Memory System. There are 2 verses each for 6 topics in 5 sets, for a total of 60 verses. I memorized this set back in college, using the New American Standard Bible.
This page offers MP3s of the Topical Memory System verses being read in various English translations, along with a written commentary on each verse by LeRoy Eims. At the bottom of the page are MP3s of the entire 60-verse set for KJV, RSV, NIV, and NASB. One version has the reader recite each verse once; the other has a repetition of each verse.
Mainline Protestantism's Fall? - Juicy Ecumenism
Mark Tooley writes: "The membership of Mainline Protestant denominations has declined by millions, and thousands of churches have closed. Many more thousands of churches, some barely surviving with a dwindling number of elderly members, will close soon. But thousands of Mainline congregations endure. Some are vital. A few are growing. And nearly universally they have very few members who care about their denominations. These members simply like their congregations....
"Some Mainline clergy are stuck in old habits and still pretend we are in 1985. Their churches will fade along with the denominations. But others are wiser. I recently lunched with a young Episcopal cleric whose church is near ours. The parking lot is full on Sundays. He told me when he came there during the pandemic while the church was physically closed the old congregation melted away. The nearly 200 people there now are young and overwhelmingly indifferent to the Episcopal Church. Some are Southern Baptists. Many have children. They like having a local church with ministries for their families. He is meeting their needs. This Episcopal priest is not conservative, but he declined a liberal parishioner's demands that he be politically outspoken from the pulpit. He knows that will not work. And it does not interest him."
Plutarch, De defectu oraculorum, section 17
The Greek historian Plutarch recounts a visit to Delphi and a dialogue about the disappearance of prophecy from once famous oracles. This section is an anecdote about a ship sailing in the Ionian Sea. A voice on the island of Paxi calls the ship's pilot by name and commands, "When you come opposite to Palodes, announce that Great Pan is dead." The pilot, Thamus, was summoned by the Emperor Tiberius, who commissioned an inquiry. Via Charles Haywood on X. Josh Centers replied to Haywood, "It was widely reported in the ancient world that the old pagan rituals stopped working after the resurrection. Christ overthrew the pagan gods and trampled down death by death." The death and resurrection of Christ occurred during the reign of Tiberius (AD 14 - AD 37).
John Milton's poem, "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity," concludes with a description of the downfall of Satan and the old pagan gods at the birth of Jesus:
And then at last our bliss
Full and perfect is,
But now begins; for from this happy day
Th'old Dragon under ground,
In straiter limits bound,
Not half so far casts his usurped sway,
And, wrath to see his kingdom fail,
Swinges the scaly horror of his folded tail.The Oracles are dumb;
No voice or hideous hum
Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine,
With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.
No nightly trance or breathed spell
Inspires the pale-ey'd priest from the prophetic cell.
Manuscripts - Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts
A searchable comprehensive database of New Testament manuscripts, with details of each and links to images.
The Bible and the American Founders, by Daniel Dreisbach
Prof. Dreisbach's 2017 talk on the influence of the Bible on government in America's founding era bolsters the case for Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters's push to include the Bible in public education. American history can't be comprehended apart from the Bible.
"How did the Bible inform the founders' political and legal pursuits? I want to get a little bit more specific here. As I've already said, the founders held diverse views, including diverse theological views. Some doubted Christianity's transcendent claims. Some doubted the Bible's divine origins. But I'm going to suggest to you that many in this generation looked to the Scriptures for insights into things like human nature, civic virtue, social order, political authority, and other concepts essential to the establishment of a political society. Perhaps more important, there was broad agreement that the Bible was essential for nurturing the kind of civic virtues that give citizens the capacity for self-government. In various conventions and representative assemblies of the age as well as in pamphlets, political sermons, and private papers, founding figures appealed to the Bible for principles, precedents, models, normative standards, and cultural motifs, to define their community and to order their great political experiments. The Bible, some thought, offered guidance on how to select righteous leaders. They thought the Bible offered guidance on the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, including the right to resist a tyrannical government....
"I don't think you can understand the most basic, fundamental features of the American constitutional design -- and by that I have in mind things like limited government, separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism, rule of law, due process of law and representative government -- without understanding this biblical anthropology, this idea that man is a fallen creature, and where power is given, that power must be checked."
Monday Morning Prayer: Dr. Stan Zygmunt - YouTube
A friend from Campus Crusade at MIT, now a long-time physics professor at Valparaiso University, speaks at a college chapel service on why we don't ask for help and why we should anyway.
This end-times movie was a staple of 1970s Baptist youth group New Year's Eve parties. First of a trilogy continued by A Distant Thunder and Image of the Beast. There's no time to change your mind. The Son has come, and you've been left behind.
