I’ll be sending out a weekly newsletter/email update soon. Please sign up by clicking here! No pressure! Speaking of which, I’ll be posting a link for copies of my new book, No Pressure, Mr. President! here soon. And for my new Christmas book, Uncle Mugsy and the Terrible Twins of Christmas! Please stay tuned to this space!
If you care about America, Os Guinness’s talk at Socrates in the City last week was profoundly important. Please click here to watch the video! SITC is thrilled to offer it to the general public at no cost for a limited time. Please share it as widely as you like! And please do get a copy of Os’s book, “A Free People’s Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future.” Finally, for my Breakpoint commentaries on the book, click here.
Someone shoot me before the earth melts, which will happen any moment now. How do I know? Simple. In the new issue of the New Yorker magazine, which once greatly (almost overweeningly) prided itself on its use of the English language, the writer Steve Coll in his opening piece for the “The Talk of the Town” uses/mis-uses/whatever, dude the phrase “honed in.” For those of you scoring at home, this marks the final milestone in the decline of Western Civilization.
The grotesque boner comes in the second paragraph of the magazine, so it’s hard to miss. As the New Yorker writers and proofreaders should know, the correct phrase is “home in”. The image is that of a homing pigeon. The popular misuse of “hone in” conflates “hone down” — which evokes a whetstone/hone used to sharpen a point, literally (blade) or figuratively (argument) — and “home in”. This misuse is heard more and more, but to read it in the opening paragraphs of the magazine — and in that section of the magazine — for which the great E.B. White (Elements of Style – yes, I’m weeping now) wrote for decades constitutes something of an Agita Apocalypsiensis, since we are all now coining ugly pseudo-phrases. But it seems The New Yorker may now think of correctness in English usage as a bourgeois/patriarchal/puritanical thing to be dispensed with. After all, they’ve been oh-so-transgressively dropping the F-bomb for a couple of decades! If fact, a couple of pages later in a piece about Penny “Hello, Laverne!” Marshall they cheerfully drop the daisy-cutter MF-bomb three times, just in case you thought they might not still be unbelievably hip. But there’s a single doily-wrapped Victorian F-bomb tossed in too. For old times’ sake. And then, a few pages later, they “Jump the Snark” and publish a “humor” piece which is a 1000-word knowing eye-roll against that ultimate bourgeois/patriarchal/puritanical conceit known as “motherhood”. Gotta stay at the forefront of these things, lest you backslide and start thinking Sarah Palin is not so bad. All right, kids. Thanks for listening. I’m done.
This past week I had the great pleasure of giving a two-day Bonhoeffer Tour of Berlin to a group of friends. We stayed at the historic Adlon Hotel on Unter der Linden and visited many Bonhoeffer sites, including his parents’ home in Charlottenburg, where he was arrested in 1943, the Grunewald home where he grew up, the Zionskirche (pictured), the Bendlerblock where Stauffenberg
and others involved in the Valkyrie plot were executed, the site of the former Gestapo Headquarters, the Kaiser-Wilhelms-Gedächtnis Kirche where Bonhoeffer preached, and other sites. For more photos of the tour — along with descriptions and details — please click here. We also had great meals (yes, there are photos), including a farewell dinner at Lutter & Wegner in the historic Gendarmenmarkt. Anything in pork?
It is said that in this quatrain the medieval French mystic Nostradamus foresaw the dark day when beach volleyball would become an Olympic sport:
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There by the Palace Horse Guards in Londinium
the four maidens leaping round a net, not blind but dumb.
On a beach with no ocean, only land
Coubertin weeps to see the rectangle of sand.
– Nostradamus (Book VI) 1536
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Click here for a FREE excerpt from my new e-book, Jesus Hates Dead Religion… To purchase a copy, please see below…
Recently, Lifeway Christian stores — under pressure from a Florida pastor — made a decision to pull “The Blindside” dvds from their shelves because of some bad language in the otherwise worthy film. I think that was a big mistake. If you haven’t followed this controversy, please read my Breakpoint commentary (”Blindsided: Heading for Cultural Irrelevance”) by clicking here. To listen to a radio interview I did on this with my BP colleague John Stonestreet, click here. And for John’s thoughtful BP commentary on Christians and the arts, click here.
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I recently had a TON of fun in Wheaton with my pals Phil (VeggieTales creator) Vischer and Skye Jethani on Phil’s new podcast… please have a listen… I’m excited that Phil is doing these podcasts and even more excited about his new internet tv show, which will be airing soon. I was one of his first guests… Visit www.PhilVischer.com for updates…
Here’s an interview I did recently with SALVO magazine about my experience at the National Prayer Breakfast…
