October 12, 2023

Many ages in church history were full of men who sought to, albeit sometimes in a misguided way, attain greater levels of holiness.They worked at it.The prioritized it.While I would not advocate for the monasticism of the Desert Fathers, or the rigidity of the Puritans, we must admire their effor...

October 9, 2023

Something I haven’t written a lot about is the fact that I’ve been involved in some kind of athletic endeavor for pretty much all my life. I played team sports when I was a kid like soccer and basketball and baseball, which I hated. In early high school I ran track and cross country, which were a...

September 29, 2023

I wholeheartedly reject the idea that any technological developments are “inevitable”.To say the opposite is to ascribe technological progress to some inhuman, cosmic, or mystical force, like gravitation, or entropy, or fate. That isn’t how any technology comes about.Technological progress is fun...

September 25, 2023

The “Dead Internet Hypothesis” is the hypothesis that the majority of the content on the internet is AI generated, and that actual human voices make up a small minority of the content that is actually out there.This is not just a wild conspiracy theory. Automated website development is actually f...

September 5, 2023

Economics

Technology

The paradoxical thing about wealthy societies, according to church historian Glenn Sunshine, is that they eventually become more expensive than their wealth. This is because wealth often comes with added complexity. Wealth is not simply how many dollars you have. Dollars in and of themselves are ...

August 23, 2023

Technology

Over the past couple of years, I have slowly been disconnecting myself from the technological matrix that has seemingly engulfed everything good, true, and beautiful in our world. A few years ago I completely disconnected from Instagram and Facebook. I had an anon Twitter account for short period...

July 22, 2023

Masculinity

The land of the Geats was peaceful, ruled and guarded by king Beowulf, now an old man. All was well, until a lowly thief, a man of weak constitution, stole from the treasure collection of a dragon. That old hoard guard was awakened to human footsteps, and accounted among his vast wealth that one ...

January 27, 2023

Masculinity

One thing that isn’t often discussed is how much grief you experience just by growing up.Thomas Cole’s 1840 and 1842 works called The Voyage of Life allegorize the trajectory of a man’s life in a series of 4 paintings, depicting childhood, youth, manhood, and old age. Cole accompanied his paintin...

August 9, 2022

Covenant Theology

As an ardent Particular Baptist, I’m ashamed to say that I’ve had a recent fling with paedobaptism. Like a relationship with that girl from church camp you had one summer back in 10th grade, my dive into covenants, signs, and things signified, was passionate, fervent, and animated. For some time,...

July 13, 2022

Covenant Theology

There are those who say that circumcision is not a sign of faith, but rather an ordinance of the law, having nothing to do with faith at all. They do not deny that the sign of circumcision was the sign of the Old Covenant, rather, they uphold that the Old Covenant was only a covenant in the flesh...

January 10, 2022

Resistance Theory

The Christian tradition has always placed a strong emphasis on property ownership. In fact, it is such a central concept to the law of God that it is one of the Ten Commandments: “do not steal”. The books of the law, like with the other commandments, give various case law examples of how to “not ...

August 24, 2021

Resistance Theory

Church History

Leviathan Raises His HeadIn some parts of the world, the dominant political theory from the late 16th century to roughly the late 18th century was a doctrine known as the Divine Right of Kings. This doctrine states that a monarch is not answerable to any earthly authority. The reasoning behind th...

August 17, 2021

Covenant Theology

The Reformed world is one which is largely characterized by agreement. For all that Reformed men and women like to debate the minutiae of Reformed Theology, the fact remains that these disputes are largely insignificant when contrasted with the larger issues of the faith. The Reformed world is a ...

July 17, 2021

History

A few months ago, a good friend of mine sent me an essay written by notable British general and historian Sir John Bagot Glubb called The Fate of Empires in which he examined the lifespans of eleven different empires across history. Glubb’s observation was that each empire spanned a period of app...

May 19, 2021

Philosophy

History

There are chiefly three regimes of thought that have developed throughout human history. These are, in historical order: the Premodern, the Modern, and the Postmodern. All three of them have different ways of determining what is True, what is Good, and what is Beautiful.In general, the regime of ...

April 12, 2021

Church History

Resistance Theory

On the day of the feast of St. Bartholomew in the year 1572, thousands Huguenots were slaughtered in the streets of Paris by mobs of Roman Catholics under the decree of the French monarchy.The Huguenots were a Protestant theological minority in France. They were importers of Calvin’s theology, an...