“TIF but I didn’t LOL” (updated)

Gramma addresses some textese. [updated link] She also proposes TIF for That Is Funny, or TIVF for That Is Very Funny, to use when you aren’t really Laughing Out Loud. Because it’s lying to say you are, when you aren’t. Added: There’s a follow up post at the same blog.

Read Full Post »

Is underage dating training kids for failed relationships?

This young woman thinks so. And says why. hat tip: Barbara Curtis

Read Full Post »

Revival of Orthodoxy high tech exhibit (in Russia)

First, read this short post, for backgound. Then, either using James M. Kushiner’s link there, or coming back here, try to carve out twelve minutes to watch the video. Hang on through the first part, if you think it’s slow or not interesting. You’ll need to see from about minute eight and a half on, [...]

Read Full Post »

Biblical illiteracy and the media

Eric Metaxas (like a lot of us) has noticed that ignorance about the Bible keeps showing up in places like the New York Times. He provides some almost-comical examples. I’d probably laugh harder if I hadn’t been a Biblically illiterate newspaper reporter for about ten years – and the editor of the religion page for [...]

Read Full Post »

Book review: A Special Mother Is Born

Gerard Nadal writes: This book addresses one of the burning issues of our day. With prenatal diagnostics leading to the abortions of the less-than-perfect among us, with parents who are frightened into paralysis by these diagnoses and a medical establishment increasingly surrendering to the cowardice of eugenics, over thirty mothers and three fathers of special [...]

Read Full Post »

The Founders’ Faith

Some American history, from Citizen Magazine (emphasis in original): …Today, there are some — mainly on the Left — who paint the Founders not as Christians but as Deists, believers in an impersonal creator who left his creations to fend for themselves. But while that description fits less than a handful of the Founders, to [...]

Read Full Post »

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, revisited

From Mr. Smith and The Ides of March, by Robinson O’Brien-Bours: While both Clooney’s and Capra’s films depict a political system rife with corruption, there is a hugely important difference between the two. Clooney’s dark and pessimistic tale brings no closure to it, and no hope; one leaves the theater with a bitter sense of [...]

Read Full Post »

7 Quick Takes Friday (Updated)

1. Does anyone know which Bible translation(s) the American Founding Fathers were using? It’s my understanding that the Pilgrims used the Geneva Bible (which I’m reading on Kindle in a 1587 edition), but it occurs to me that (off the top of my head) I don’t know what the Founders were hauling with them to [...]

Read Full Post »

A little art history (and why so much of it today is ugly)

From “Life Imitates Art: Redeeming Pop Culture” (Chuck Colson, Breakpoint Commentary, September 22, 1999): …Up until the Enlightenment, art was seen as a way of expressing profound truths. Not necessarily literal truth; yet even symbols and metaphors reflect something true about reality—like portraying angels with wings or saints with halos. Beauty itself was seen as [...]

Read Full Post »

The American Mind, or The Logic of Freedom

Letters from an Ohio Farmer provides a great little history and philosophy lesson, in The American Mind.

Read Full Post »