Gene Edward Veith Jr.'s Blog, page 329

“The hardest place on earth to be a Christian”

That would be Pakistan, according to Jesse Johnson.  It isn’t just that Christian are persecuted by the government.  The entire culture systematically excludes, punishes, and torments Christians.  Christians may not attend schools or universities, so most of them are illiterate.  This keeps them from getting decent jobs. Their testimony is not accepted in a court [Read More...]

Scientists claim that we’ll find alien life in 20 years

The government-funded effort to find alien life–known as SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Life)–is running out of money.  So its scientists testified before Congress, claiming that extraterrestrial life is a virtual certainty and that we should find it within 20 years. Do you see anything wrong with that testimony? From Aliens are for real and we [Read More...]

The Santa Barbara killings

Is there anything that can be said about the 22-year-old who killed six people–stabbing three, then shooting three more before killing himself–in Santa Barbara?  Elliott Rodger, the affluent son of the assistant director of the Hunger Games,  gave his reasons in a 171-page manifesto and a series of YouTube videos, but his motive comes down [Read More...]

Natural law vs. nominalism

Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon, an Orthodox priest, gives a lucid explanation of the difference between “natural law” and “nominalism” when it comes to moral philosophy.  He does so in a way that makes it nearly impossible to believe that Luther was a nominalist, as he is often accused of being.  Fr. Reardon also goes on [Read More...]

Anti-American conservatism?

Conservative think-tanker Peter Wehner cites recent speeches by Wayne La Pierre, Ben Carson, and Michelle Bachmann that describe America as a fundamentally corrupt neo-Nazi police state.  That is exactly what the New Left of the 1970′s said. Read Mr. Wehner’s warnings against this mindset and this rhetoric after the jump.  And then consider. . . [Read More...]

Music of localism and vocation

Thanks to Hillsdale Professor Korey Maas for alerting me to Emily Dunbar, a Lutheran musician who sings about vocation and a sense of place.  After the jump, what Dr. Maas says about her, along with a links to her music. From the New Reformation Press blog: Place, Vocation, and Horse-Shoes  by Korey Maas Popular music [Read More...]

A song about vocation–or is it?

Thanks to Dan Kempin for alerting me to this song “Do Everything” by Contemporary Christian Music artist Stephen Curtis Chapman.  It is about vocation, but it is about the Reformed doctrine of vocation, rather than the Lutheran doctrine of vocation.  They overlap, but the Reformed emphasis is that the purpose of vocation is to glorify [Read More...]

Putin as conservative?

The word “conservative” means different things in the United States and Europe.  American conservatives tend to value personal liberty, free market economics, and small government.  Europeans call that being “liberal.”  European conservatives tend to hearken back to the good old days of the monarchies, being suspicious of democracy and civil liberties.  Both the European left [Read More...]

Cranach at the Met

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City has put much of its collection online in digitized high-resolution images, including scores of works by the patron of this blog Lucas Cranach.  Go to this link:  Search | The Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Click the title of the work and you will go to a [Read More...]

What the LCMS believes about the Bible

We blogged about the Brief Statement of the Doctrinal Position of the LCMS.  President Harrison has now posted an excerpt from the Statement of Biblical and Confessional Principles, passed by convention in 1973, in response to the church schism over the inerrancy of Scripture.  But that’s not all the statement affirms, setting off the Lutheran [Read More...]