The Empathy Wars | Doug Wilson Blog & Mablog 2021-03-17 | In this episode, pastor Doug Wilson discusses the recent hubbub surrounding Joe Rigney and the Man Rampant episode, "The Sin of Empathy."All links mentioned are available below:Original Trailer: youtube.com/watch?v=wox3kXo8_gERigney's Writings on Empathy: desiringgod.org/articles/killing-them-softlydesiringgod.org/articles/the-enticing-sin-of-empathyTwitter thread:twitter.com/joe_rigney/status/1371881500925337603White's Blog Post:aomin.org/aoblog/theologymatters/on-the-sin-of-empathyWhite's Full Dividing Line episode:youtube.com/watch?v=VAw5fJZN8hsVideo about Empathy/Sympathy from Brene Brown:youtube.com/watch?v=1Evwgu369JwStay tuned to the end of this video for a special announcement!
The Problem with Having Faith #faith #dougwilson Blog & Mablog 2024-10-16 | Subscribe to Canon+: JoinCanonPlus.com
Jumping Off the Barn | Blog and Mablog Blog & Mablog 2024-10-16 | Brash and confident, the inventor stands perched on the roof of the barn. Strapped to his arms, and across his back, is a flying contraption of his own devising. It is made of wood, wire, and canvas; a modern Daedelus stands ready to take flight. He believes, and believes strongly, that he has conquered the age-old problem of flight. Down on the ground, a movie camera quietly whirs, recording the momentous event. He waves to the camera and jumps off.
A Hard Case | Blog and Mablog Blog & Mablog 2024-10-14 | We believe the Proconsul Petronius made the right decision in sending you to us. We do believe that we can be of some help to you—we really care.
Love for Your People, Disordered Affections, and Failing the Stress Test | Blog and Mablog Blog & Mablog 2024-10-09 | I said that the disciples of Christ need to hate their fathers, mothers, wives, children, brothers and sisters, and if they do not, then they cannot be Christ’s followers, and I also said that Christians should prefer hanging out with their own people, as over against other people. Is this not a contradiction? No, not at all.
TheoFoes, TheoBros, and Mother Jones in TheoThroes | Blog & Mablog Blog & Mablog 2024-10-07 | Where are all the women, Wilson? Well, I was born in a middle class family . . Where are all the women, Wilson? I honestly don’t know, frankly. I am not a biologist.Where are all the women, Wilson? Trapped in a cubicle at Goldman Sachs, weeping over their vanishing fertility . . . no, wait. That ‘s somebody else’s women.
American Color | Blog and Mablog Blog & Mablog 2024-10-02 | Depending on how gaudy it is, I work to include slang in how I write, and I work at being colorful in other ways as well.
Coalitions and Weirdos | Blog and Mablog Blog & Mablog 2024-09-30 | You should be grateful to God for your heritage because it is the one that God gave to you. When someone gives you a birthday present, you say thank you, and you say thank you for the gift that you were actually given.
Prop 1: A Five Gallon Bucket of Bad Ideas Blog & Mablog 2024-09-25 | I would like to take a moment, dear reader, to explain why ranked-choice-voting is a really bad idea.
In All His Holy Mountain | Blog and Mablog Blog & Mablog 2024-09-23 | Credenda ArchivesVol. 5/Num. 1As we look at the world around us, it is easy to lose heart. But this does not excuse us, for it is our principal sin—we look at the world to determine what is possible instead of looking and faith to the risen Christ, seated with the Father. When the ten spies came back from spying out the land, they were not praised for their faintheartedness. Why should we expect praise for the same kind of faintheartedness?
Jim & Bessie | Blog and Mablog Blog & Mablog 2024-09-18 | Parents are not in charge of which particular impressions they will make on their children, or on which particular memories their children will treasure for the rest of their lives. The parents may work, prepare, save money, and plan for that “special vacation” somewhere, which none of the children remember, and yet leave an indelible mark “that time we stopped for popsicles in Potlatch on the way back from the baptism.”
Smashmouth Rising | Blog and Mablog Blog & Mablog 2024-09-16 | On a subject as volatile as this one, simplistic binary thinking can lead straight to a radicalism that not one of us should want. Back in 1994, I (and our circle) had various clashes with Paul Hill, the man who shot the abortionist in Florida, and who was afterwards executed. His logic was linear and very simplistic. It was also intellectually and theologically lazy. We have been here before, and I don’t like it very much.The full conversation: youtube.com/watch?v=-gbaRNhBgLs
On Churchill and the Pulling Down of Statues | Blog and Mablog Blog & Mablog 2024-09-11 | How and why have conservatives gotten suckered into the popular pastime of pulling down of statues?This will take some unpacking, so bear with me.
What’s Wrong With Human Rights? | Blog and Mablog Blog & Mablog 2024-09-09 | When the fear of God is missing from an entire culture, when a society has formally embraced a civic atheism, what then? When a society has forcibly banned any consideration of transcendent holiness as any possible basis for our corporate behavior together, what then? I have already indicated the path that all such societies are on. There will be death camps, and struggle sessions, and abortion mills, and death panels, and confiscatory raids, and all of it, all the time, blanketed with nonstop lies.
Love Must Be Uneven to Be True | Blog and Mablog Blog & Mablog 2024-09-04 | How should I love all those people out there in the great, wide world? Well, the apostle says that we should do it as we “have opportunity.” When something arises. When you see the beat-up guy between Jerusalem and Jericho. When you have a chance to do something for a fellow, make sure to do it. But to whom should we make a point of it? To those of the household of faith. To our fellow Christians. Especially to them.
The Fingerbone of St. Johnny of Cash | Blog and Mablog Blog & Mablog 2024-09-02 | Whenever I am tired of looking like I am defending chattel slavery, I like to switch it up in order to look like I am a full-throated advocate of cussing. That’s just what I do.
NO dOnt DO iT! #politics #electiondebates #christianconservative #joincanonplus #blogandmablog Blog & Mablog 2024-08-29 | Watch the full Blog: youtube.com/watch?v=n3fLPllhZqo
7 Theses on Educating Your Daughters | Blog and Mablog Blog & Mablog 2024-08-28 | If the chief end of man is to glorify God, and the center of our attempts to glorify Him is the worship of God on the Lord’s Day, and “man” is understood as being made up of male and female (Gen. 1:27), this means that the education that prepares us to worship God intelligently is as much for the girls as it is for the boys.
Why Your Vote Is No Sacrament | Blog and Mablog Blog & Mablog 2024-08-26 | When you are voting, you are not performing a discrete action, like putting the eight ball into the corner pocket. And you are not on an undercover mission, sleeping with other women. You are not the holy hermit, appointing the righteous man to be king. Rather, you are leaning in the direction of a more desirable state of affairs, together with millions of others. Imagine the canoe of state, containing millions. You can lean to port, or to starboard. Or you can just sit there, thinking pure thoughts, getting in the way.
Shes conning Conservatives #politics #history #podcast #blogandmablog Blog & Mablog 2024-08-22 | Watch the full blog here: youtube.com/watch?v=6AgxlkIIhPs&t=29s
Narnian Lessons for Idaho - Blog and Mablog Blog & Mablog 2024-08-21 | When I first encountered Protestant resistance theory I took to it like a trout being released back into the stream by a kind fisherman, and the reason for this—I am convinced—is because I had taken it in many years earlier, like mother’s milk, thanks to CS Lewis.
Sounds FV | Blog and Mablog Blog & Mablog 2024-08-19 | Justifying faith does not evaporate once the moment of justification has passed. The justification itself is over and done because the declaration of “not guilty” has been made. But the faith that did nothing other than rest in and receive the imputation of Christ’s righteousness does not, at that moment, go out of existence. That faith, which was given by God, remains alive. It is living faith, and moreover, it is still alive. It is still alive, and ready to do other things. The other things that it does are in the realm of sanctification—not justification—but they are done by the same faith. Smith changes the oil in his car on Monday and takes his wife to dinner on Tuesday, and changing oil and dinner dates are completely different things. But Smith is the same man who does them both.
The Death of God, our Founding Fathers, Nietzsche, Tombs of the Prophets, & a Few Other Ends & Odds Blog & Mablog 2024-08-14 | The heirs of all foundings tend to be temporizing curators . . . curators who do not understand what they are tending. They are not the trained historians that they think they are. They are not true keepers of the foundings, but rather waifs and foundlings.
A Tweet Thread Credo | Blog & Mablog Blog & Mablog 2024-08-12 | I believe God created the world—and everything else—the way He said He did, and when He said He did.
a message EVERYONE NEEDS to hear | Dont Believe Anyone Blog & Mablog 2024-08-07 | Doug Wilson goes off on the unilateral duplicity of the establishments in recent times. #politics #life #christian #bible #conservative #trump #biden #news #funny #kamalaharris
On Donning a Three-Layered Tinfoil Hat | Blog & Mablog Blog & Mablog 2024-08-07 | Do not believe any official narrative that emanates from the DC area, or from any mainstream media outlet. If the weather guy announces that the sun is going to rise in the east tomorrow, you should squint at him quizzically. You should squint that way because it is going to be connected to a climate change lecture. Fortunately, this skepticism I am urging is a task that has been made a lot easier by the behavior of our institutions over the last few years. Name an official institution that has not been laboring mightily (and successfully) to divest itself of all credibility through various duplicitous monkeyshines. I mean, the military, the media, Congress, the Justice Department, the CDC, the colleges and universities, the governor of Minnesota, you know, the lot.
law vs morality and Christianity | Doug Wilson Blog & Mablog 2024-08-06 | #christian #christianity #atheist #politics #history
stop enforcing abominations with the sword | Doug Wilson Blog & Mablog 2024-08-06 | #christian #civilliberties #conservativevalues #theology #philosophy #law #politics
On Making the Sword Righteous | Blog & Mablog Blog & Mablog 2024-08-05 | Absolutely, swords do not create Christians. But can Christians create righteous swords? Can anything be done with these things?The issue is not whether swords can make men Christian. They cannot. The issue is whether Christian men can make swords Christian.
Calvinists in Cages?!? #joincanonplus #blogandmablog #calvinism #arminianism Blog & Mablog 2024-08-01 | Subscribe to @blogandmablog
socialism is .... Blog & Mablog 2024-08-01 | #podcast #conservativevalues #socialism #christianity #film #politics #atheism
On Shooting Your Way Out | Blog & Mablog Blog & Mablog 2024-08-01 | I trust that you are braced for Operation Gaslight. You are about to witness the power of propaganda, where the principalities of the media, by sheer dint of brazen and shameless lying, will try to convince millions of people that Kamala was never ever the border czar. That, my friend, is what we here at Fact Checkers Incorporated call “misinformation.” You know, fake news. What were you thinking?In response to this, we need to make it our disciplined practice to contradict all manifest lies. Kill every cockroach you see, whether it is a big one or a little one or an in between one.
wretched olympic blasphemy Blog & Mablog 2024-07-31 | #olympics #conservativevalues #theology #politics #christianity
Olympic Blasphemy Because, Why Not? | Blog & Mablog Blog & Mablog 2024-07-31 | The blasphemous fiasco of the opening ceremonies of the Olympics blew up while I was traveling, and so I begin by recognizing that I am late to the party. I would apologize for that if it were in any way my own fault, but in this case at least, it was not. I didn’t even get to post before an inadequate apology was dragged out of them.
A Deeper Right Than Being Right | Blog & Mablog Blog & Mablog 2024-07-29 | Nothing is more incongruous than to see individuals who affirm the doctrine of election, but whose lives are characterized by harshness. We are taught here that the uniform of those who understand election is tender mercies.So there is a deeper right than “being right.” If we affirm the letter of Scripture, but do not live according to the Spirit who gave it, then we betray the cause of truth.Of course this is not said to justify setting aside the plain teaching of Scripture through an appeal to the “deeper” truths it contains. As always, we must affirm only what the Bible teaches and all of what the Bible teaches. And affirming is not enough; we are to adorn these truths with tender mercies.
Smashmouth Incrementalism and the Trump Train | Blog & Mablog Blog & Mablog 2024-07-25 | Link to Tiny Heartbeat Ministries: tinyheartbeatministries.com Tiny Heartbeat Ministries is a Christian nonprofit to save lives here and for eternity through the opposition of abortion and the pursuit of active evangelism. The last month has seen a number of remarkable and momentous events. We may begin with Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, the pressure on him to step down, and the palace intrigue that resulted in him bowing out of the race, but not stepping down from the presidency, and then topped off by his weird disappearance and reappearance.And then on the other side, the close-call near assassination of Donald Trump and his triumphant fist in the air, followed by the Republican platform backing away from its long-standing commitment to life, followed hard by the selection of JD Vance for veep. This last point was heartening in a lot of ways, but disheartening because Vance apparently softened his pro-life stand in order to qualify for the slot, when he clearly knows better. This brings in—with a sickening but not surprising thud—the realization that in this Trump-transformed Republican Party, commitment to life is not a principle, but rather has become a bargaining chip.
A Rejoinder to Internet Randos on the Jews, NatCon4, and a Couple of Hindus | Blog and Mablog Blog & Mablog 2024-07-22 | Over the last few weeks, a few different things have happened that have set off various comment threads, in which Internet Randos have arisen to take me to task for continuing to be a boomer about the Jews. Along with some other stuff. As this is clearly an outrage not to be borne, I thought I would I say a few things about all of that here.
The Shimmering Unreality of Race Realism | Blog & Mablog Blog & Mablog 2024-07-18 | Another fact is that almost all the people involved in receiving this undeserved gift in the first wave of gospel expansion were white, from which some deep thinkers concluded that it was the winsomeness of our whiteness that drew the gospel to us as our due reward—which grossly misunderstands the nature of true gospel. The gospel is only for wretches, which the Europe of that day was full of—wretched savages. Being proud of whiteness on that account is like somebody noticing that the first six people who went forward at a Billy Graham crusade all had blue eyes, and concluding from this that blue eyes were the key factor, and not the prayer of repentance.And the people who hate whites, envying them their cultural blessings, are like the tenth drunk getting saved at that crusade being upset because a drunk up ahead of him got saved first. It is all beyond ridiculous.But all of it was the grace of God, promised centuries before, and not one ounce of it deserved.
That Photo | Blog & Mablog Blog & Mablog 2024-07-15 | Fist raised to reassure his people, and the same fist raised in defiance of his enemies. Red, white, and blue. Red blood, white cuff, and blue jacket. American flag in the background. Blood on his face. The position of the fist makes it look like he is holding the flag up. About the only thing missing is a bald eagle flying in the background, or a cloud in the shape of a bust of George Washington. There is a weird and uncanny providence unfolding in all of this. The whole thing is beyond epic. Trump is clearly a man with basic animal courage.Given all of this, I am grateful that Trump struck the right note in his statement when he said that it was “God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening.” God’s holy providence superintends everything, and this really is true about all of our actions . . . rough hew them how we will. But sometimes it is just glaringly obvious, like now.Look at that photo again. It was obviously staged. Just not by Trump.
Devil in a Blue Dress | Blog and Mablog Blog & Mablog 2024-07-12 | We grant that some of our fathers sometimes went beyond the Scriptures in their treatment of “entertainment,” and they did so in a manner inconsistent with Christian liberty. Nevertheless, if our modern brain-dead-through-watching-the-tube generation of Christians were shown to these older critics of the stage, they would certainly be confronted with an overwhelming temptation to offer us up as Exhibit A in support of their thesis. Put another way, our generation of saints is not the model of Christian liberty it purports to be, but rather an example of something referred to by the Westminster divines—“They who, upon pretence of Christian liberty, do practise any sin, or cherish any lust, do thereby destroy the end of Christian liberty. . .” In other words, the foes of godly liberty are not merely to be found on the legalistic right, but also on the libertine left.
Victory Lane | Blog and Mablog Blog & Mablog 2024-07-10 | “Hey!”Dave stopped and looked down, opening his eyes.Another boy was by the side of the road. He was standing next to a driveway that led off to the right, between two fenced-off meadows, presumably back to a house in the trees. Dave thought he was about two years older, and twenty pounds heavier. They both stood still for a moment watching each other, sizing one another up.“You’re new here.” No question, just a statement.Dave nodded and swallowed. The other kid was not standing the way new friends stand.
Stories Versus the Official Narrative | Blog and Mablog Blog & Mablog 2024-07-10 | Stories are made up of folks who wouldn’t turn back. And official narratives are composed by people who won’t stop lying. If we may borrow Churchill’s comment about architecture, healthy societies shape their stories, and then their stories shape those societies. Diseased societies cling to their diseased narratives and we see the same kind of reciprocity going on, only downhill.And of course, in Christian societies, the central and foundational story is the one about the one who died for His people, and who then came back from the dead. That is also the template for all of our other stories.
Presidential Debates in a Late Stage Empire | Blog & Mablog Blog & Mablog 2024-07-10 | So this is what it is like, I muse to myself. The Visigoths battered down the gates, came in to have a look around, didn’t think much of what they saw, and decided to head on home.I hear that Caligula made his horse a senator, and everybody thought it was hilarious.The civic souffle has collapsed, my friend. Putting it back in the oven for another thirty minutes will not accomplish what you are hoping it will.So here we are, living in a banana republic, and we don’t even have the climate for growing bananas. So what is the rationale of our big-think decision-makers? Why are they now using plastic bananas? Everybody can see what it is now. And so here we are, staring at this disintegrating spectacle bug-eyed. I mean, everything is disintegrating except for the bananas, which are plastic.Not much that we can do about any of this at present, but maybe we can walk around and have a look-see. Maybe we can ponder a bit.
On the Imposition of Liberty | Doug Wilson Blog & Mablog 2024-06-26 | What is the relationship between virtue and liberty? Not only is it an important question, it is also a vexed question. Not surprisingly, a good deal of confusion surrounds it. Some of the confusion is honest confusion, and some of it is not so honest. But either way, it is still confusion.A related item, and equally confused, is the question of whether or not the preservation of individual liberty is the prime directive when it comes to the exercise of political power. The libertarian (and the liberal) would both say yes. The historic conservative would say no—but not because liberty is not to be protected, but rather because it is not the only good to be protected. There are national goods besides individual liberty, and let me count the ways.
On Christian Secularism: In Conversation with Jeff Ventrella | Doug Wilson Blog & Mablog 2024-06-25 | We live in a time when the governing paradigm of our ruling elites is that of secularism, and by this I mean the godless kind. They are governing a population that still contains millions of Christians, many of whom have somehow taken on their assumptions about the ownership of the secular realm, as the bad guys define it, thinking it really does belong to them, or to the devil and his angels.But in recent years, as the madness that is this unbelief has gotten increasingly more like itself, more and more Christians are thinking something like “wait a minute” to themselves. “This can’t be right.” As a consequence, they are willing to consider proposals that seemed outlandish to them just ten years ago. This is why the idea of Christian nationalism is even a thing. But how do we get from where we are now to the place where biblical norms are recognized and honored again? Among those Christians who believe this to be a desideratum there are three basic approaches.
Recovering the Masculine Mind | Doug Wilson Blog & Mablog 2024-06-19 | The problem can be called by many names. The men of our generation have had a failure of nerve. They have abdicated their responsibilities, and we are consequently in the midst of a crisis of leadership. Men have fallen, to use the biblical term, into the sin of unbelief. God has always promised tremendous blessings for those who keep his covenant faithfully but, to be blunt, men no longer believe Him. We have fallen so far away from his Word that we no longer even know what a covenant is—still less the terms of His covenant with us and the nature of covenant reality around us.
A Warm Invitation to Child Communion | Doug Wilson Blog & Mablog 2024-06-11 | Pastor Wilson writes a letter to a fictional friend who is looking into the practice of child communion.My goal in this is not “to prove” anything, or even to defend it against criticism. My intention is much more simple. It is simply to describe what it is like to think about the sacrament the way we do. And if I am successful, I will not have necessarily persuaded you of anything. I will not have converted you to the view that child communion is the way to go—although I would certainly hope for that.Rather, Lord willing, I will have written of it in such a way that you understand why it matters so much to us. And perhaps I will even have written in such a way as to make even the strictest advocate of credo-communion turn away from this prospect with some regret, thinking “wouldn’t it be wonderful if this were true?”
