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The Pious Executioner

Frantz Schmidt was a family man, a respected city official, and a pious Christian. He was also a consumate professional who worked in an occupation that required that he flog, maim, hang, behead, drown, and bury alive various criminals: June 5, 1573. “Leonardt Russ of Ceyern, a thief. Executed . . . . Continue Reading »

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Robots?

Courtesy of our friends at Netflix, who are frequently mentioned on this site and consequently should be advertising here, the wife and I watched Bruce Willis’s movie, Surrogates. It’s a good movie with a decent though predictable plot, a few veteran actors provide a little panache, a . . . . Continue Reading »

Satan’s Hermeneutic

Satan. A word which the LXX and translators of the Masoretic Old Testament chose different methods. A translator has two different choices when dealing with a proper name or title. Transliteration or translation ... that is make the word sound the same, or literally translate the meaning of the . . . . Continue Reading »

Exceptional

My friend Doug Wilson has a great post today about American Exceptionalism. Here’s a piece of it:If anyone could believe in exceptionalism, and have actual verses to point to, it would have been the Hebrews. And yet note that God warns them of this pattern, which is as old as dirt. He included . . . . Continue Reading »

On the Square Today

Joseph Bottum on anti-Catholicism in French thought : There remains to this day a snarl in French conservative thought, where all sorts of threads are knotted together: nationalists tangled up with anti-Semites, monarchists, anti-Dreyfusards, Lefebverists, and those aging colonialists who long to . . . . Continue Reading »

Bailing out the Problem of Evil [6]

The last time we mentioned that if Joseph had never been sold into slavery, he would have never been in a position to become what he became.And the wily atheist — the one who admits, btw, that even he might be willing to suffer for the sake of something, like being part of the 60 million who . . . . Continue Reading »

Amis Afoul

Martin Amis and Anna Ford are “having a go of it,” as they say. It all started with Amis’s complaint in The Guardian that newspapers make him out to be more controversial than he is . Ford, a longtime friend, responds with an open letter accusing him of narcissism and an . . . . Continue Reading »

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