It’s unrealistic about marriage. A Guardian blogger complains: “The modern wedding, with its stupendous cost (£20,000 on average) and duration, is really a celebration of the participants. They really are unique and precious snowflakes, just as they have suspected all along. In fact, they are each and both of them just the unique and precious […]
Democracies don’t have famines
“If it were possible to sum up in one sentence Ethiopia’s struggles with famine over the past quarter-century, I’d suggest this: It’s not the rains, it’s the rulers. As Peter Gill makes clear in Famines and Foreigners, his well-turned account of the country’s miseries since the 1984-85 famine and the Live Aid concert meant to relieve […]
Mission Support. Who’s fooling whom?
Two ELCA congregations – Roseville Lutheran (Roseville, MN) and First Lutheran (Freeport, IL) were recently honored for giving a combined total of $830,000 to the ELCA for mission. Did they increase the Global Mission budget by $830,000? Nope. Because the ELCA operates on a unified budget, it’s not possible to increase money for mission. If […]
Herbert Chilstrom is for “luv”
In a recent news report Chilstrom carries water for the ELCA once again, attacking those leaving as fixated on sex and mixed up in general. But: 1. Chilstrom equates the Gospel with tolerance, with a simplistic universalism of “luv.” He needs a theological course correction, beginning with “the cross alone is our theology” (Luther). 2. Chilstrom […]
On This Day, 1600 Years Ago, Rome Fell
On This Day, 1600 Years Ago, Rome Fell[1] And, as a consequence, Augustine wrote The City of God. Was the fall of Rome a sign of the end? Were the Christians at fault because they had rejected the religion of the City of Man, symbolized by Rome? What was God doing, anyway? “Here we have […]