A Time to Laugh

A busy kitchen remodel and a frenetic Disney vacation have given me time to digest some of the more subtle but still dramatically different ideas I’m hearing outside of fundamentalism.
In fundamentalism, appeals to humility are a persistent trope. Keswick author Andrew Murray’s little book Humility is a regular assignment to BJU undergraduates, and so it [...]

Humans are human because they are conscious of living within a community. When the sense of fellowship is lost humanity is lost.
Giambattista Vico

Symmetry works for me. Not a Jeffersonian kind of decorating symmetry where the left side of your house matches the right. But a symmetry of feeling. It’s almost a smell. A color.
I felt [...]

And what he likes most of all to do is play. Most Fives play very well indeed. The body is now under a more smooth and skillful control, and therefore most Fives can play without too much adult help or guidance.
Ames & Ilg’s Your Five Year Old: Sunny and Serene

I try to read the respective [...]

Emotionally, Two seems much of the time to be comfortable and content. Life feels good to him. Emotions do not take over as they do at some other ages. Two can express his warm affections both by the sound of his voice and by his cozy, snuggling ways. There is an easy give-and-take between parent [...]

Let him begin by treating patriotism . . . as part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely a part of the “cause,” in which [...]

In reading about Screwtape, I found this 1947 Time article about C.S. Lewis. Give it a read. It’s interesting to see him in his own time while enjoying our own Sunday morning coffee:
Lewis’ idea of Heaven is not the 20th Century’s watered-down version of ineffable, gaseous ecstasy, but a state as real as Sunday [...]

The inside of the White House doesn’t have the luminous quality that you might expect from television or film; it seems well kept but worn, a big old house that one imagines might be a bit draughty on cold winter nights.
On a chilly January afternoon in 2005, the day before my swearing-in as a senator, [...]

It always seemed like we lived across the street from dentists. In South Bend, it was Dr. Rosenbaum. In Tulsa, it was Dr. Hudson (who has since retired). They always had the scariest decorations for Halloween. Ghosts that moved across the porch on wires and loud music blaring. Both had the top houses in the [...]

We just got this book from the library, and it was quickly my sons’ favorite. They love the pictures and that we can sing along with it. And they love the message. Gavin even repeats, “You [in] God Hand, Mommy!” It warms my heart and encourages my spirit.
I remember hearing a sermon in my indy-fundy [...]

Chickens can be taught that only one specific pitch [of a ringing bell] is a food-signal. . . . If one rings the bell next time, not to feed the chickens, but to assemble them for chopping off their heads, they come faithfully running, on the strength of the character which a ringing bell possesses [...]