miscellany [ mis-uh-ley-nee], noun
1. a miscellaneous collection or group of various or somewhat unrelated items
2. a miscellaneous collection of literary compositions or pieces by several authors, dealing with various topics, assembled in a volume or book

The Death of Christendom, the Rise of the Church. We all tend to lament the decline of American Christianity in the last 50 years or so. The blatant assaults on our faith are wearying, and we know they will only get worse. But we ought to take heart! With the blasphemous Olympic opening ceremonies for context, Pr. Joel Hess writes, "Yet again, people were abused by a blatant mockery of the crucifixion of Jesus, a Jew, a human being, a loving person, and God. I can’t keep up; I thought we were against oppression these days. That being said, since people don’t know Jesus, apart from plenty of Christians who think it’s a political party, maybe we can excuse their ignorance. Worse, however, we were assaulted by more cheap, easy, and mundane performances that pass as art these days...Regardless of its merits or detriments, Christendom is dead. While people should still vote for God-pleasing and rational laws and rulers, the church should stop feigning outrage. That’s what Muslims do. They need to. Their God needs to be defended. How weak of a god is that?"

Reading and writing. . . Pr. Peters wrote this article to pastors and teachers, but his insights on the failures of our educational system and encouragement to rekindle our own love of learning is good reading for us all. "We think that the grand details of history is what we need to learn about history but reality proves that facts and details are easily forgotten and just as easily looked up. What schools need to teach most of all is not how to use our technology or on the job skills but the simplest of complex tasks -- how to read and how to write...The problem is, however, that we are reading at lower and lower grade levels across the span of time and we are writing less and less. The Covid effect upon education is not without its own concern but it was not the cause for this decline, only the reason it has been hastened. We have for a very long time been de-emphasizing these educational arts in favor of many others -- not in the least is the desire for education to fix what parents and society have screwed up in our children. But the school exists for a very important purpose and that is to equip us with the skills basic to our humanity as well as our future -- the ability to read and understand and the write in response to what we have read."

I've been reading G.K. Chesterton's short work Orthodoxy, which is his explanation of how he came to the Christian faith and decided it was the the only worldview that actually makes sense of the universe around us. His journey to Christianity is not unlike that of C.S. Lewis', though his writing isn't as easy to read. This work does, however, have some wonderful quotes about history, politics, reason, and the like:

“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”

“Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.”

“Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.”

P.S. As a bonus read this week, here's a story from First Things that fills in some blanks about heretical but influential Evangelical pastors...some of whom I named several weeks ago, including Andy Stanley and Rick Warren. The Plot to Queer Evangelical Churches