If you think you know these things, you need to read this 2003 book by Rodney Stark For the Glory of God – How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery. These are notes I took from this book of his. He passed in 2022. Continue reading
I’ll give you an example of this: David’s overwhelming love for Absalom which leads to his open rebellion, eventually hanging by his hair/head plucked from his running horse by a tree branch, and pierced through with many arrows, illustrates God’s complete insane love for us. The kind of love that sends His Son to killers on a “Perhaps-they-will-respect-Him-whim” (Luke 20:13) to give those killers another chance. Continue reading
I searched in vain for the sermon of bygone years where I said we really shouldn’t be too critical of the 1969 invented holiday of Kwanzaa since our American Christmas – the cards, the tree, Santa, and the snow-covered landscape – we’re all if not invented at least embraced in America’s 19th century. The funny part to me has always been the last, the snow-covered landscape. Continue reading
Have you seen the “We Got Now” ad campaign by New Balance? We’ll have I got one for Nike, Adidas, or Reebok, et. al. to respond with. It came to me when me and the Mrs. visited an Apple store for the first time. Turns out they do let people over 60 in…in limited numbers. We almost got tossed when my wife uttered the word TracFone. (That evidently is a vulgarity in Apple-speak.) Continue reading
I let my subscription to Harper’s lapse for a year before they made be an offer that I couldn’t refuse. Though I often referred to Harper’s in this blog overall the writing frustrated me muchly. Continue reading
It started as an ordinary Midweek Lenten Service. Befitting such a somber season the opening hymn was Alas! and did My Savior Bleed. Then we sang “for sinners such as I”. What? Did my ears deceive me? Where did the worm go? We we’re singing from a CPH’s Lutheran Service Builder Program, but good ole TLH was still in the pew. I found the worm still in the first verse. “Alas, and did my Savior bleed/ And did my Sovereign die?/ Would He devote that sacred head/ For such a worm as I?” Continue reading
This is a Reformed position, but I have heard putative Confessional Lutherans use it to defend their support of everything from psychological therapy that is now a sine qua non of a “normal” life, to Freudian “Truths”, to the daily dosing of soul sick individuals with pills that Alice would be afraid to use. Continue reading
This picture says it all. 
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The Rev. Dr. David P. Scaer is a mentor of mine. I have always looked up to him and continue to do so, but what he titles Excursus III in his memoirs Surviving the Storms does not describe “Working with the Gospels” but in my mind is working against them. He admits the he “shared a similar approach to the Gospels” (85) as Dean Wenthe, William Weinrich, and Arthur Just. The seeds I saw, but could not have identified in my seminary days (’79-83’), but which I saw take root and fruit in later years were there in Dr. Scaer. The fruit actually rotted in the case of James Volez.[1] Continue reading
