Josh Bishop Reads

Here you’ll find a hodgepodge of other people’s writing, presented without comment or explanation and tied together only by my own amusement.

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April 5th, 2013
Over the last four decades, many Americans have moved away from identifying with an “institutional” model of marriage, which seeks to integrate sex, parenthood, economic cooperation, and emotional intimacy in a permanent union. This model has been overwritten by the “soul mate” model, which sees marriage as primarily a couple-centered vehicle for personal growth, emotional intimacy, and shared consumption that depends for its survival on the happiness of both spouses. Thus where marriage used to serve as the gateway to responsible adulthood, it has come to be increasingly seen as a capstone of sorts that signals couples have arrived, both financially and emotionally—or are on the cusp of arriving.
National Marriage Project, qtd. by Ross Douthat in “Culture, Class and the Decline of Marriage”
April 3rd, 2013
Long before our own time, the customs of our ancestors moulded admirable men, and in turn these eminent men upheld the ways and institutions of their forebears. Our age, however, inherited the Republic like some beautiful painting of bygone days, its colors already fading through great age; and not only has our time neglected to freshen the colors of the picture, but we have failed to preserve its form and outlines. For what remains to us, nowadays, of the ancient ways on which the commonwealth, we are told, was founded? We see them so lost in oblivion that they are not merely neglected, but quite forgot. And what am I to say of the men? For our customs have perished for want of men to stand by them, and we are now called to an account, so that we stand impeached like men accused of capital crimes, compelled to plead our own cause. Through our vices, rather than from happenstance, we retain the word ‘republic’ long after we have lost the reality.
Cicero, qtd. by Mark T. Mitchell in “How to Lose a Republic”
March 23rd, 2013
Liberal Protestantism’s organizational decline has been accompanied by and is in part arguably the consequence of the fact that liberal Protestantism has won a decisive, larger cultural victory.
Christian Smith, qtd. by John Turner in “Did Mainline Christianity Win in the End?”
March 9th, 2013
When a society insists on the right of every individual to invent and pursue whatever spirituality they want, the same society will insist on the right of every individual to invent and pursue whatever sexuality they want.
Alan Burrow in “The Embedded Creational Link Between Spirituality and Sexuality”
February 25th, 2013
Twice in the past few weeks, I’ve heard people who identify as Christians say, in all sincerity, that they didn’t see why anybody needs to go to church, that they can “find God” on their own. I hear some version of that a good bit. With that comes an entire worldview. It’s the complete liberation of the individual from any authority other than his or her own conscience and judgment. Outside an authoritative interpretive community in which one anchors one’s own understanding, the search for God really becomes a search for oneself, and the deification of one’s own attitudes and desires.
Rod Dreher in “The Past as Bathwater”
February 22nd, 2013
‘Look, Mom, I can detect oppression narratives in 19th-century New England literature while bringing myself to orgasm atop a pogo stick!’ the Allegheny liberal arts graduate can say, from the comfort of her parents’ basement.
Rod Dreher in “Lenten Observance At Allegheny College”
February 13th, 2013
The more truly we can see life as a fairy tale, the more clearly the tale resolves itself into war with the dragon who is wasting fairyland.
G.K. Chesterton, qtd. by Joseph Pearce in “‘The Hobbit’ and Virtue”
February 12th, 2013
A Christian believes in dragons, even if he can’t see them, and knows that they are perilous and potentially deadly. They are certainly not to be courted, nor is it wise to toy with them.
Joseph Pearce in “‘The Hobbit’ and Virtue”
February 11th, 2013
But as we descend into the maelstrom of the next few decades, which I am beginning to suspect will look like the last ten minutes of a three-act farce, there will be times when I expect this Scots Presbyterian will be manning the barricades right next to someone who says the rosary more than he ought to. Oh, well. What can you do? It’s a farce.
Douglas Wilson in “Your Average Evangelical Squish”
February 8th, 2013
The christening of Europe seemed to all our ancestors, whether they welcomed it themselves as Christians, or, like Gibbon, deplored it as humanistic unbelievers, a unique, irreversible event. But we have seen the opposite process. Of course the un-christening of Europe in our time is not quite complete; neither was her christening in the Dark Ages. But roughly speaking we may say that whereas all history was for our ancestors divided into two periods, the pre-Christian and the Christian, and two only, for us it falls into three—the pre-Christian, the Christian, and what may reasonably be called the post-Christian. This surely must make a momentous difference
C.S. Lewis, qtd. by Rod Dreher in “Danish Church Seeks Dinosaur”