Men #2 Heroic Virtues

The second question Jesus asked the multitudes concerning John the Baptist, points out another characteristic of the type of men we need now.

“What went ye out for to see? A man clothed in soft raiment?

In 1940, as it was becoming obvious that the war that was devastating Europe and Britain was about to draw the United States in as well, Walter Lippmann, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, spoke to the thirtieth reunion of the Harvard class of 1910.  He began by quoting the words of George Washington written when it appeared that the Constitutional Congress would fail:

If to please the people, we offer what we ourselves disapprove, how can we afterwards defend our work? Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair.

Men #1- Men and Little Old Ladies

What does this country need? 
When it comes to economic solutions I prefer Marx- Groucho, not Karl- who said what this country needs is a good ten-cent nickel. He said when some one purchased something for a nickel they would get a nickel in change. If taken care of properly a nickel could last a family a life time. But there is one form of deficit we have that can not be dealt with so light-heartedly.  As it seems we are reminded daily, this nation is in desperate need of good men.

Of No Earthly Good

It has been said derogatorily of Christians that they are only interested in “pie in the sky, when they die, by and by”, and that they are “so Heavenly minded they are of no earthly good”.  The idea, supposedly, is that people who have a Christian world view have mentally opted out of dealing with thorny secular problems of the day; that their interests are limited to a few “religious issues”. A study released in April by the Barna group does show that there is a voting group that has an AWOL attitude about world concerns, but it is not the Christians.

Not Just Another Pretty Phrase-The 400th Year of the KJV

    

A culture that does not possess this common store of image and allegory will be a perilously thin one.  To seek relentlessly to update it or make it “relevant” is to miss the point, like yearning for a hip-hop Shakespeare.  ‘Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward’, says the book of Job.  Want to try to improve that for Twitter?                               

This was spoken about the King James Version of the Bible, which celebrates its 400 anniversary this year.  It was spoken by one of the Hitchens men in a recent article in Vanity Fair; not Peter, the returned prodigal, but his brother Christopher, the persistent unrepentant. 

A Modest Proposal for Reasonable Service

It was the old country preacher who said, “A theological bias is harder to remove than a Canadian thistle.”  One survey from the Barna folks seem to bear this out, and the results of a second survey draws some relevent implications.