Postcards from Palookaville

In reflecting on Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism after nearly a century, it is very clear that it is a work which presents in particular Christian form the pathologies of the modern age. In its prioritizing of experience and psychology, its disdain for history, and its practical...

Paul Helm dropped me a note to comment that, although it is true that we live in a world which fears exclusion, there are still many socially acceptable voluntary organization which do exclude people: political parties, for example. This is a good point. I would respond by saying that a full...

The third area where Machen anticipates the kind of dilemmas now faced by the contemporary church is in the matter of discipline. In a post-Freudian, post-Foucaultian world, the very notion of discipline sounds repressive and abusive, yet Machen clearly understood that this is vital for a healthy...

I recently had the pleasure of doing a double act with my old friend, Bruce Gordon, of Yale Divinity School, at the launch of the new journal, Unio cum Christo . Bruce's lecture (on Calvin and Bullinger) and mine on Benito Mussolini's little known biography of the Bohemian reformer, John...

On the back of Todd's post yesterday , about Steven Furtick and the Southern Baptist Convention, there comes this from his friend, Perry Noble . In his essay on the Brumaire coup, Karl Marx quotes Hegel as saying that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce...

As Aimee pointed out yesterday , the LORD does act on occasion to teach us a lesson and my confidence that having only biological sons would protect me from having to be in touch with my more tender emotions has proved ill-founded. Of course, the great thing about being in the OPC is that the only...

On Monday, I offered some reflections on Machen's analysis of liberalism in terms of Philip Rieff's arguments about the rise of psychological man. Another theme in Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism is liberalism’s functional abandonment of history as a source of any authority...

To begin with a question: What would Gresham Machen think of the current state of the union with regard to sexual ethics and the connection between these and the increasing pressure on religious freedom? I suspect he would be shocked by the particularities of the case, that the most private of...

This week, Team Spin gatecrashed the ETS annual conference at Atlanta where we did some interviews and I sat on two panels, one for the Colson Center, on Christianity and culture, and one for President Al Mohler, on Christianity after the sexual revolution. Odd places for someone whose only...

One of the strangest aspects of American Christian culture to a foreigner like myself is the popularity of dispensationalism. There are probably many reasons for the large numbers of supporters this system commands in the New World but high among them is surely the role of the Scofield Reference...