Gene Edward Veith Jr.'s Blog, page 293
November 3, 2014
Baseball predictions result show
Here at the Cranach Institute, we not only make predictions, we check them. Twice at this blog, at the beginning of the baseball season and at the beginning of the playoffs, we held a forum to predict what baseball teams would make it through the playoffs and which one would win the World Series. We [Read More...]
November 1, 2014
October 31, 2014
Halloween & Reformation Day
Happy Halloween! Happy Reformation Day! We’ll be posting on both of those holidays today. Both have reference, of course, to the really big holiday of the church year on the day after, All Saints’ Day. All the ghosts and devils were thought to come out the day before All Saints’ Day, since this was their [Read More...]
Blaming the Reformation
I’ve been reading various cultural critiques of the mess we’ve gotten ourselves into, and several put the blame on the Reformation. The Reformation gave us radical individualism! The Reformation gave us the notion that truth is whatever we interpret it to be! The Reformation drained the physical world of its spiritual significance! The Reformation drained [Read More...]
America’s third favorite holiday
Halloween is America’s third favorite holiday, just after Christmas and Thanksgiving. (See the whole list after the jump.) Halloween used to be a holiday mainly for children dressing up and going trick-or-treat, but now it has been seized by adults, who also like to dress up and scare themselves. Why do you think Halloween has [Read More...]
Why do people like to be scared?
Dr. Margee Kerr is a “scare specialist.” In addition to college teaching, she is the staff sociologist at ScareHouse, a “haunted house” in Pittsburgh, which apparently consults her scientific expertise in designing effects that scare people. The Atlantic interviews her on the question of why some people like to get scared. From Why Do Some [Read More...]
October 30, 2014
Growing acceptance of “post-birth abortion”
With the help of modern science, pro-lifers have pretty much won the argument that a baby in the womb is a human life, there being little difference between a child in the womb and a child outside the womb. But that doesn’t mean pro-abortion zealots are necessarily changing their beliefs. To an increasing number, this [Read More...]
Luther rap
For Reformation week. . .
Ancient Polynesians had children with American Indians
Easter Island, known for its mysterious stone figures, is 2,300 miles from South America. And yet, DNA research has found that the ancient Polynesians had children with Native Americans. This happened between 1300 and 1500 A.D. Today, the residents of Easter Island are 10% American Indian. Meanwhile two skulls have been found in Brazil that [Read More...]
October 29, 2014
Bondage vs. Freedom
Our pastor said that each one of us is a “filthy, rotten, putrid, maggot-infested cesspool of a sinner.” But he meant it in a nice way. See his Reformation Sunday sermon, drawn from John 8:31-36, on the bondage of sin and the freedom that Christ gives. Excerpt after the jump. From Rev. James Douthwaite, St. [Read More...]
