The other day, when we were getting ready to put the kids to bed, our oldest pulled one of us aside and described a day he suddenly remembered from a few years ago, “when I was little.” It was nothing very unusual, just a funny way we were sitting next to each other and talking. But he recalled it with what was clearly a lot of fondness. Here was a seven-year-old waxing nostalgic about the good old days when he was four, and we thought how much more of this he has to look forward to, how many more years he has to pile up good memories before he leaves the nest for good. And all of us will have this to draw on for the rest of our lives.

-the Tracinskis

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I’ve discovered this week just how much His Majesty can be a pain in the

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Bruce Charlton is thinking deeply about the Atonement. He is working out alternatives to the customary belief that Christ took on the punitive consequences of sin for us and to the customary liberal notion that the atonement was fundamentally an act of symbolic engineering to excise our retrograde belief in sin and guilt. Charlton thinks he’s found one. (more…)

Love is not best considered as a feeling, it is not necessarily something at the forefront of consciousness. For many people, their deepest love is something which structures their life, rather than being at the front of our conscious deliberations for most of the time. Some (I am one of them) are very expressive of love – but this is not a necessity; and some very loving cultures and families and marriages do not go in for statements, hugs or tears.

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My understanding of the absolute necessity of loving God above all else is metaphysical rather than psychological – that without this, all other loves (including the love of Jesus) lose their meaning and function.

The supremacy of our love for God is that it makes all other loves possible – it makes other loves a matter of eternal significance.

-thus Bruce Charlton.

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Someone someday will celebrate the last Christmas. (more…)

Peace like a river. (more…)

The past with the clarity and beauty of a Bruegel landscape

Why is living in the past so popular a pastime?
. . . .

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I’m going to swim out into deep waters in this post. Stand by with lifesavers. (more…)

I saw the other day the Sphinx’s painted face.
She had painted her face in order to ogle Time.
And he has spared no other painted face in all the world but hers.
Delilah was younger than she, and Delilah is dust. Time hath loved nothing but this worthless painted face. (more…)

The flower of the pear-tree gathers and turns to fruit;
The swallows’ eggs have hatched into young birds.
When the Seasons’ changes thus confront the mind
What comfort can the Doctrine of Tao give? (more…)

Places long unseen often loom larger in memory than they really are. That haystack on the old farm . . . that green lane . . . that high fence in the back yard and the tree we climbed to look over it – surely they were an important part of the universe. And the old house had yawning caves in the closets, and untold mysteries in that deep cellar and up in that beckoning yet forbidding attic. Why, that house couldn’t have been as small as now it seems.

I remember these things, and they were real, and and they are real now where I keep them in remembrance.

But we can’t go back.

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Read this article by apologist extraordinaire Dan Petersen. (more…)

Brigham Young had a lot of zest for life, but you wouldn’t know it from some of his preaching. He seemed to take the position that this life is the time to prepare to meet God and only valuable insomuch as it prepares us. (more…)

Not only will it be like this, it must be like this. (more…)

Read this interesting interview with a woman who realized that her recovered memories of child abuse were false. (more…)