Posts Tagged ‘God’

Sexual sin is so predominantly the sin in the minds of many that the words “lust” and “immorality” are understood to refer exclusively to it.  This error led Dorothy Sayers to title her essay on the seven deadly sins “The Other Six Deadly Sins.”[1] The consequences of this error are so extensive that they need to be exposed before we can even begin to discuss the sin of sexual lust.  We’ll look at the two most deleterious consequences. Read the rest of this entry »

Gluttony is the inordinate or excessive love of food and drink.  The simplicity of this definition may obscure the theological and psychological depths of this deadly sin. The concluding line of the previous post on avarice, which described gluttony as the “falsely jovial sin,” was intended to hint at its potential oversimplification.  In particular, it was meant to highlight two important challenges to understanding the sin of gluttony. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2006 movie Stranger than Fiction is proof positive that the fantastic is able to explore the depths of reality, a subject that realism never seems to be able to grasp. Read the rest of this entry »

I often feel that the modern world has gone mad, but I must admit that I was caught off guard when I discovered in the eighteenth-century philosopher Thomas Reid (1710-1796) an epistemological source of our condition.  The madness of the modern world is its solipsistic undercurrents, which leave us feeling painfully alone. Read the rest of this entry »

In my last post I reviewed the classic 1967 movie Cool Hand Luke (https://www.billisley.com/2017/06/cool-hand-luke-reviewing-a-classic/) and highlighted its religious symbolism in which Luke is portrayed as a suffering messiah struggling against oppressive forces.  A little while later, I was preparing a lesson on anger and read an excerpt from Martin Luther King’s Strength to Love.  The contrast between King’s resistance to oppression and Luke’s is extremely important and especially relevant in contemporary America’s disastrous cultural and political divisions. Read the rest of this entry »