Don't know much about history
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. ..."So begins Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and if you ever set out to write a novel you should try if you can to produce an opening sentence as good as that one. But don't bother trying to do better, it can't be done. That's perfection, right there -- a memorable quip that presents, in miniature, the world, plot and central conflicts of the novel while simultaneously and indelibly establishing the sardonic voice and view of the narrator. Genius.Anyway, I repeat this line here not just to bask in the brilliance of Jane

Pulling a Lieberman
First let me say a word in praise and defense of my former boss, my professor, mentor and friend Ron Sider. I need to start off with this affirming word because by the end of this post -- and in the one to follow -- I'm afraid I'm going to have to be rather harshly critical of my old friend.Sider's book Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger is an unflinching, uncompromising assessment of the Christian obligation to share with those in need. I know of few people able or willing to live up to that book's powerful call to sacrificial generosity, but Sider himself has done so for many decades. He is a gentle, irenic man and a Good Man.But he is a Good Man in a Bad System

Toxic smugness
Hey kids! It's time to play "Stupid? Or Evil?"Today's contestant is Chuck Colson:"If someone walks in our church and says, 'You preach a sermon on [homosexuality], we're going to arrest you as a violation of the hate crimes,' then they'll have to arrest us."I'm going to have to go with "Evil" here. Colson knows this is utter nonsense. He's enjoying the posture of self-aggrandizing bravado, but he knows full well that hate crimes has nothing to do with his fantasies about Gay Stormtroopers invading churches.Colson knows that he's spinning falsehoods here. He knows

Bruce Barnes must die
I apologize for the recent lack of regularly scheduled Left Behind Fridays here lately. (And, for that matter, the lack of much of anything else.)We'll never get through the seven-year Great Tribulation at this rate, and the stalled progress on our weekly Bruce Barnes Death Countdown is getting frustrating.But let me beg your indulgence for one more week and let's set our calendars for December 4 to resume our journey through the World's Worst Books.This Friday is a holiday, after all, a national Holy Day during which it is the sacred duty of every American to go out and buy lots of stuff, thereby generating the Consumer Demand that is the basis of our national and g

Fresh thread
From Mark Noll's The Civil War as Theological Crisis:American national culture had been built in substantial part by voluntary and democratic appropriation of Scripture. Yet if by following such an approach to the Bible there resulted an unbridgeable chasm of opinion about what Scripture actually taught, there were no resources within democratic or voluntary procedures to resolve the public division of opinion that was created by voluntary and democratic interpretation of the Bible. The Book that made the nation was destroying the nation; the nation that had taken to the Book was rescued not by the Book but by the force of arms.