It has been a long time since I have posted here, so I thought that I would get the ball rolling by posting a retraction of previous statements that I have made regarding the movement Christian Reconstructionism. Though I still think what I do about how Christians should interact with the government, it is appropriate for me to publicly “take back” what I said about something I only distantly understood. Read more
I know, I know. We are on hiatus until September. That is still true! But I wanted to take a moment to let you guys know what at least two of us are up to in the mean time.
Nathan and I are both competing in something called Photo Fight. We’ll be taking pictures, they will be posted, people will vote, and only one will survive. Or, at least only one person will be declared the winner. The other will just be sad.
Anyways, pictures start getting posted on July 1st, and the bios are already up. So, go check it out!
We’ll be back in September. (And there may be occasional posts from time to time before then.)
Last Wednesday, James posted a response to an essay I had posted a week earlier, which was itself an example of the kind of thinking that Stephan had written about closer to the beginning of this blog. This excites me because it represents a respectful and serious engagement of ideas, which is what this blog is all about in the first place. Continuing this grand trajectory of ideas, I’m now posting my own response to James’ response to my application of Stephan’s original series, per his intention. All this to say: we’re all friends here, are taking our disagreement seriously and are enjoying ourselves. Read more
Everybody thinks whatever they have to in order to keep thinking what they already thought. Yeah, that’s right. Your perception of any charged event is strongly shaped by your desire to reinforce what you already thought. We are capable of thinking critically, but we don’t do it nearly as often as we think we do. Basically, we interpret the world the way we already decided we interpret it, which reinforces our conviction that we interpret it correctly. Read more
Last week, my fellow blogger Staples offered up an argument in defense of polygyny. To say it more correctly, he offered an argument against the idea that monogamy is a practice that can be defended strongly from the Bible. It is my intention to push back on some of his ideas, and maybe end up with another response from him. I guess only time will tell.
I like to consider myself a student of humor, always striving to improve my own technique. I carefully craft each joke—a dash of absurdity here, a bit of strained repetition there, brush the margins of acceptability over here, thinly and evenly distribute irony across the top, and glaze with good timing. Because my face is usually morose and somewhat funereal, I stick with deadpan delivery. The fact that people often cannot tell whether I am joking magnifies the impact of the joke: by the time they realize that I am being funny, they find themselves assaulted on every side with bone-dry wit. Read more
