Blog Archive
for June, 2007
Woman vs. Serpent, Round Two
— Thursday, June 28th, 2007 —
Char-La Fowler, a pastor’s wife in Charleston, South Carolina and a dear friend of the Moore family, sent me the following email today, and it made my household’s morning:
“I enjoyed reading your ‘All Things Dark and Terrible’ essay this morning, especially in light of the copperhead we killed Monday night. The one my personal, earthly dragon-slayer, my husband Calvin, hunted down and killed 4 feet from the swingset, after it had coiled up and raised its nasty little diamond-shaped head to strike. It was a juvenile, just hatched live from its unseen mother. Part of a litter that averages between 4 and 7, but can be up to 14. I recall in-between the loud thumps of my racing heart and my mad dash for the flat-head shovel, repulsively thinking that we were in a live drama of Genesis 3 right in my own backyard. At that moment and those that followed, the enmity between the snake and the woman could not have been greater!
“My son Richard, almost 12, wanted to watch the decapitation and then couldn’t wait to hold up the headless body and examine the guts that had bulged out. ‘We need a magnifying glass! Somebody go get the magnifying glass!’ Henry, just 3 and barefoot, was entirely too close but impossible to keep back, wide-eyed and yelling and jumping with excitement. He later examined the lifeless thing laying on the patio table as long as we would let him. Calvin, for his part, seemed a little taller and later dissected the head to get a better look at the fangs. (You may collect more years, but some things never change.) The girls, on the other hand, took one look at it, were thoroughly disgusted, and went back inside to attend to such important matters as Mr. Popper’s Penguins and Hannah Montana.
Keep Reading...An Atheist in a Foxhole
— Friday, June 1st, 2007 —
The email debate between neo-atheist Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson is now completed, all of it archived on Christianity Today’s website.
Throughout the debate Wilson challenged Hitchens as to the foundational basis of his ongoing moral judgments. Hitchens seemed to misunderstand Wilson’s point as being that an atheist couldn’t be moral while Wilson, echoing Romans 2, repeatedly reasserted that, no, the issue is that an atheist cannot account rationally for his morality.
Whatever one thinks of the debate itself, we can all surely agree with Wilson’s final challenge to the curmudgeonly Hitchens.
Keep Reading...
