Friday in the Wild: May 23, 2014

This being Friday, once again it is my pleasure to present the various goodness from the Web that made me laugh, pay attention, agree heartily, or just think.

I don't agree with Douglas Wilson on the finer points of theology, but I enjoy reading his writing; he uses well-pointed sarcasm as an art medium. He makes a very good point in last Saturday's post about the whole Michael Sam gay-kiss thing, the revulsion of some at the kiss, and the revulsion of the leftist literati at the revulsion:

As to the charge that I am fighting for Christian privilege, the reply is “you bet I am.” When the Christian faith is privileged, then freedom for everyone becomes a possibility. When Christian privilege is made illegal, and its denunciation mandatory, as it has been in our time, the first thing that happens is that we see the essentially coercive nature of unbelief revealed. Unbelievers have never built a free society and they never will. They have been running this one for just a few minutes now, and they are already driving up and down the streets with their Coercion Trucks, loudspeakers blaring that it is past curfew and we are all supposed to go inside now, place our noses on the specially designated freedom wall, and think grateful thoughts about how much Uplift Congress will be able to generate next session. When we wake up in the morning, we can all have a breakfast of liberty gruel, designed by the first lady’s personal nutritionist and national sadist.

[Read The Gaylag Archipelago]

I discovered UNC-Wilmington criminology professor and columnist Mike S. Adams a while ago, and he's fast becoming my favourite columnist for his take on campus liberty issues and the young mushy-headed students that the modern university churns out. In this week's column, he responds to a typical critical email that he received:

It’s no secret that university graduates are becoming more intellectually lazy with each passing year. It is also undeniable that they are becoming more arrogant, in spite of the fact that they are less capable of forming solid opinions and defending them with well-reasoned arguments. A letter written to me (by a recent UNC-Wilmington graduate) is illustrative. . . .

The opening line of her response is typical of today's college graduate in at least two specific ways. First, there is the tendency to respond to the tone rather than the substance of an argument. Second, there is the tendency to project motives of anger and fear onto others simply because they hold a different opinion. Gone are the days when we evaluated arguments. Today we evaluate emotions. This is particularly the case when sexual orientation is either directly or tangentially related to the topic at hand.

[Read Graduation, Celebration and the Obfuscation Generation]

The accusation is frequently leveled at pro-life conservatives that they only care for life before it's been born. Try again.

Tim Challies evaluates the faddish Bible-reading practice of lectio divina:

This, then, is a danger in Lectio Divina, that it may teach us to approach the text subjectively rather than objectively, and that in this way it leads to unstable, unsupportable conclusions. Though it appears to elevate piety, it may just train us to preach badly.

[Read The Danger of Lectio Divina]

Lastly, Jamie Brown attended the National Worship Leader Conference recently, and reports on some eye-opening trends in modern worship that cause him concern, most notably:

[T]hroughout the conference, at different sessions, with different worship leaders, from different circles, using different approaches, and leading with different bands, I picked up on a common theme. It’s been growing over the last few decades. And to be honest, it’s a troubling theme. And if this current generation of worship leaders doesn’t change this theme, then corporate worship in evangelicalism really is headed for a major crash.

It’s the theme of performancism. The worship leader as the performer. The congregation as the audience. The sanctuary as the concert hall.

[Read Are We Headed for a Crash? Reflections on the Current State of Evangelical Worship]

And, for now, that's all. As always, Share and Enjoy!