Outer Rim Territories

Musings, ramblings, and nonsense from the fringe of space and time
 

The Crucible of the (Extended) Christian Family

Beautifully said.

This observation and experience, which has intensified over the past ten years of my life, may explain why I have gone from being an educational entrepreneur and desiring to move my family to greener pastures where the external culture at least appears better, to being a homeschool advocate who desires nothing more than for his children and grandchildren to marry fellow believers and settle down near one another, where they can contribute and partake of the blessed heat generated in this crucible of the extended Christian family living under the cross in the forgiveness of Christ. via Lutherans and Procreation: The Crucible of the (Extended) Christian Family.

Filed under  //   Ethics  
Posted April 26, 2010 by Christopher Gillespie 
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Bitter Pill | First Things

I urge you to read this recent article in First Things on the economic and social effect of contraception. The author analyzes the effects of the pill through the sciences. The conclusions might surprise you. From Bitter Pill | First Things:

If the arguments above are true, why do women agree to use contraception? More pointedly, why are so many women so vocal that contraception is a necessity—indeed, that it is their birthright? The answer is that contraception sets up what game theorists refer to as a “prisoner’s dilemma.” The idea is a simple and powerful one. A prisoner’s dilemma is any social setting wherein all parties have a choice between cooperation and noncooperation, and where all parties would be better off if they choose cooperation. But because people in a prisoner’s-dilemma setting cannot effectively coordinate and enforce cooperation, all parties choose the best individual choice, which is noncooperation. The social result is disastrous, and everyone is made poorer.
via Bitter Pill | First Things.

Filed under  //   Ethics  
Posted April 20, 2010 by Christopher Gillespie 
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Touchstone Magazine - Mere Comments: Cremation and a New Kind of Christianity

“As hellfire receded, there advanced the literal fires of the crematorium.” So writes Oxford historian Diarmaid MacCulloch in the concluding chapter of his massive Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. The history ends with a chapter on “culture wars,” the ways Christianity is experiencing change and tumult as it enters the twenty-first century. In the conclusion, MacCulloch traces out many of the controversies one might expect: from the challenges to Orthodoxy in a post-Soviet world to the Anglican sexual debates to the American fights over abortion and secularism and liberalism. One of the primary changes in Christianity the historian sees, however, would probably surprise most Americans as being a “culture war” issue at all: cremation and burial. Increasing rates of cremation in the West, MacCulloch writes, are surprising because cremation “is the abandonment of a key aspect of Christian practice since its early days.” MacCulloch demonstrates that a primary feature of the early Christian church was as “burial club.” He shows how “universally archaeologists are able to detect the spread of Christian culture through the ancient and early medieval world by the excavation of corpse burials oriented east-west.” via Touchstone Magazine - Mere Comments: Cremation and a New Kind of Christianity.

Filed under  //   Ethics  
Posted April 7, 2010 by Christopher Gillespie 
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