Here’s some links to start your week off on a good note — no ifs, ands, or buts about it:

• The problem of evil: How can an all-good, all-powerful God permit evil? Here’s a nice review of this theological dilemma: A Brief Primer on the Problem of Evil
• The essence of poetry: How do you express something inexpressible? T. S. Eliot: Things That Can Just Barely Be Said
• Christianity and Knowledge: Christianity often gets placed in the upstairs “values” room (right next to the “feelings” room), far above the downstairs “science and facts” room where truth and knowledge reside. But is Christianity in fact a source of knowledge rather than just subjective “values”? Check this out: Christianity as a Knowledge Tradition. Key paragraph:
   

  The empty self is narcissistic, inordinately individualistic, self-absorbed, infantile, passive, and motivated by instant gratification. The empty self experiences a loss of personal significance and worth, as well as a chronic emotional hunger and emptiness. The empty self satiates itself with consumer goods, calories, experiences, politicians, romantic partners, and empathetic therapists. The empty self does not value learning for its own sake, is unwilling to defer gratification under the demands of discipline, and prefers visual stimulation to abstract thought. Applied to education, a classroom of empty selves will reinforce a view of education in which learning exists to make the student happy, to satisfy his/her emotional hunger, and to fulfill his/her own plans for success.

  Moreover, with the secular relativization of truth, knowledge and reason outside the hard sciences, secularism has contributed to the absolutization of desire satisfaction. With truth and reason dethroned as guides for life, something had to take its place. And the heir to the throne is the absolute importance of satisfying one \'s desire. Secularism helps to prop up this value in the culture by its denial of truth and reason in matters of worldview, along with its promulgation of a naïve and destructive notion of tolerance.

  Now, lest you think he is overstating his case — check this out for an excellent example of the empty self: God, where’s my big fat plasma?. Ahh, those happy-go-lucky, benign secularists — all Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot really wanted was a big-screen TV…

• Deconstructing the deconstructionists: History of marriage in Western law and culture: Keeping Marriage Public

That’s all for now — God bless, back soon.