Gene Edward Veith Jr.'s Blog, page 22
May 10, 2018
“The Assumption of the Humanity into God”
The resurrected Jesus was with His disciples for 40 days, and then He returned to His Father. So on the 40th day after Easter, making it always fall on a Thursday, we celebrate Ascension Day. Today is that day. This is one of the most significant and yet strangely neglected observances of the Church Year. […]
What We Spend on Food
Over half of the money that Americans spend on food goes for eating out in restaurants. And what we pay for the actual production of food by farmers is only 7.8 cents for every dollar we spend. Caitlin Dewey, writing in the Washington Post, draws on data from the U. S. Department of Agriculture to […]
May 9, 2018
How Religious Success Can Threaten Faith
Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) is a thinker I want to look into more, writing as he does about civilizational change and the dire influence of gnosticism. In this quotation, he says that the “worldly success” of a religion brings on its decline. This is because a religion of power is incompatible with a religion of […]
How the Real Thanos Wiped Out Millions
We finally watched Avengers: Infinity War. The super villain in that story is Thanos, who has the well-intentioned goal of killing half of all living things in the universe, so that the other half can flourish. I am greatly encouraged that such population explosion obsession is presented as, ultimately, evil. Jibran Khan makes the point in […]
May 8, 2018
God and the Different Kinds of Despair
There are all kinds of negative emotions. Not all of them are morally or spiritually bad, as such. Depression, for example, can come upon a person for good reasons or because of a medical condition. Depression is not the same thing as despair, which implies utterly giving up on everything. Rod Dreher, author of The […]
How a Genealogy Site Caught the Golden State Killer
The Golden State Killer raped more than 50 women and murdered 12 of them. This was in California back in the 1970s and 1980s. After all this time, last month the serial killer was identified and arrested. I hadn’t heard the full story of how this happened, but Stephen Prescott, president of the Oklahoma Medical […]
May 7, 2018
Another Look at How Fathers Influence Their Children’s Churchgoing
Nathan Rinne, who blogs with Jordan Cooper at Just and Sinner here at Patheos, discusses a post that I wrote a number of years ago entitled “Raising children so they will go to church as adults”. I drew on a 1994 study in Switzerland, published in 2000, that found that if the father goes to church […]
And Now, American Red Guards
How far is the Left going in the United States? We now have American Maoists who are calling for “revolutionary violence.” An Antifa group is calling itself the “Red Guards” and has adopted the ideology and the rhetoric of Chairman Mao and his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. There are currently cells in Austin, Pittsburgh, Kansas City, […]
May 4, 2018
On Catholics’ “Indissolubility” of Marriage from a New Lutheran Blog
I have blogged about my former student John Ehrett, who wrote that perceptive review of our book Authentic Christianity. I am glad to see that he is now writing for Patheos at his blog Between Two Kingdoms: Lutheran Musings on Christianity, Culture, and Civil Society. This will significantly enhance the Lutheran presence here at Patheos. I […]
The 200th Birthday of Karl Marx
May 5 is the 200th birthday of Karl Marx. Seldom have the ideas of one person wreaked such havoc. And yet, despite the fall of the Soviet Union, he remains idolized and influential. Marx’s theory of Communism caused revolutions, wars, and gulags, and was responsible for the death of some 100 million human beings. In […]
