Useful Links for February 13th through February 24th
These are some links for February 13th through February 24th. Enjoy!
- David Brooks: Hope against faith – International Herald Tribune – If Obama is mostly successful, then the epistemological skepticism natural to conservatives will have been discredited. We will know that highly trained government experts are capable of quickly designing and executing top-down transformational change.
If they mostly fail, then liberalism will suffer a grievous blow, and conservatives will be called upon to restore order and sanity.
- FIRST THINGS: On the Square » Blog Archive » Recovering the Bible – These days this unity can no long be presumed. Over the last two hundred years, the work of biblical interpretation has rotated away from the churchly business of teaching doctrine. Bible scholars have built their own independent intellectual project, one that excludes Church doctrine from the process of interpretation as a matter of principle. The job of the modern historical exegete is to scientifically determine what a particular portion of the Bible meant when it was composed, not how it should be read by the Church today.
- Touchstone Archives: Divorced from Reality – Take the case of Marvin Singer, who was jailed without trial for not paying an attorney he never hired $100,000—only half of what the court claimed he “owes.” In Virginia, one father was ordered to pay two years’ worth of his salary to a lawyer he also did not hire for a divorce he did not request. Once arrested, the father is summarily jailed. There is no formal charge, no jury, and no trial.
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A commonplace of political science is that bureaucracies relentlessly expand, often by creating the very problem they exist to address. Appalling as it sounds, the conclusion is inescapable that we have created a massive army of officials with a vested interest in child abuse.
- Commentary: Don’t mortgage our children’s future – CNN.com – As for the jobs created in the short-term, what's the cost? The Heritage Foundation crunched the president's own numbers and came up with this startling figure: for every single job the bill creates, American taxpayers will spend $223,000.
I LOVED the R. R. Reno article and could not agree more. In my 2-year journey from ‘generic’ Protestantism to the historic Reformed faith I would say that the discovery (rather, Spirit-led enlightenment) that the Old Testament is Christian (as opposed to merely ‘Hebrew’) was among the most important. Of course, Jesus told the Judaics of his day that very thing in John 5:39. Add to that my love of Calvin’s and Henry’s commentaries, and it makes for a wonderful article.
I also agree (and lament) the disconnect between scriptural exegesis and Church doctrine–both of which need more attention among the Church to-day (I Peter 3:15).