Edible: Good to eat and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.
-Ambrose Bierce
The Devil’s Dictionary

All homes have places where discipline occurs. As I was growing up, it was the basement. When we were “sent to the basement,” this is where my father would admonish us, discipline us, pray with us afterwards, and graciously invite us to rejoin the fellowship of the family. In other homes, the place varies according to convenience—it may be one of the back bedrooms, or the bathroom. But I have never heard of a godly home where the point of discipline was the dining room, during the course of dinner. Sometimes during dinner a child has to be taken from the table for discipline, but no one that I know of brings a child to the table for discipline. We bring our children to the table for food.

Discipline is important. Confession of sin is important. Working through hard issues of sin and restitution is important. But this Table is the place for fellowship, kindness, laughter, and joy. So come, and receive the gracious nourishment offered.

Some might object to this as too casual. They might say that Jesus said that if your brother had something against you, leave your gift on the altar, and go, put it right. Yes, and we really should do this. But notice that He said we should not give in this condition, not that we should not receive in this condition. So stop tithing, stop putting your gifts in the offering box in the back until you have put things right with your brother (as far as it is possible with you). Let this be your reminder to get things right. Leave your gift envelope in Your Bible until you get things right. But churches rarely tell the saints to stop giving them money until the donor is back in fellowship

But this is a radical gospel message. Until you put things right, we will not stop offering the grace of God to you. But if you have the power to do so, and you do not put things right with your brother, then stop tithing. Stop bringing your offerings. God would rather have your obedience than your money. Is the obedience hard? Do you need strength to undertake it? That strength is here.

Douglas Wilson, May 2006

We learnt that equality is about equal worth, not equal outcomes. Today our idea of society is shaped around mutual responsibility; a deal, an agreement between citizens, not a one-way gift, from the well-off to the dependent.

~Prime Minister Tony Blair, Brighton, October 2, 2001

Equality, rightly understood as our founding fathers understood it, leads to the liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences; wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.

~Barry Goldwater, 1964

Inequality will exist as long as liberty exists. It unavoidably results from that very liberty itself.

~Alexander Hamilton

We are told, ad nauseam, that a computer has to go into every classroom to prepare us for the twenty-first century. We have not yet realized that the computers may simply be moving our ignorance around the planet at incredible rates of speed. As one wag put it, “We used to think that a million monkeys typing away at a million keyboards could produce the works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not the case.” A fool in the back of a cart bumping along the road five hundred years ago is, today, a fool in the backseat of a Lexus. Certain things are not changed by the computer dashboard.

Douglas Wilson, Angels in the Architecture, 176.

We want fat-souled children. We want them to have full, faithful lives–joyful, balanced, and lovely. But wisdom doesn’t happen passively. It takes a diligent household and constant prayer, but with that He promises that “the soul of the diligent shall be made fat” (Prov. 13:4). That should be our prayer: Lord enable us to raise children with fat souls. “He that putteth his trust in the Lord shall be made fat” (Prov. 28:25).

Doug Jones, Angels in the Architecture, 125

Stories frame a child’s interior life for living in this world. Fiction is far more realistic than we realize. Fiction and poetry mysteriously transfer truth in a far more powerful way than anything else. God Himself chose to write in passionate poetry and narrative and parables rather than in the bureaucratic style of a systematic theology.

Doug Jones, Angels in the Architecture, 124.

We talk of our willingness to die for the children, but are we willing to sincerely sacrifice careers and vacations and personal talents for their sakes without bitterness? The whole orientation of our household must be focused on sacrificing for our children. This is a sign of deep love.

Doug Jones, Angels in the Architecture, 123.

Part of learning to celebrate includes learning how to splurge and not be so tightly utilitarian. Our culture is so wicked in its neglect of savings and its slavery to plastic credit cards that we, with some right, run the other direction. But if your house is in order, it’s time to learn how to splurge at times. Beauty isn’t cheap, and neither are artistic meals and good wines.

Doug Jones, Angels in the Architecture, 84.

The first Herp Dinner, in 1977, was an outstanding success… The final spread was magnificent and included sautéed alligator tail…; legs of bullfrogs, leopard frogs, and green frogs; snapping turtle salad, (excellent on crackers); slider turtle stew; crispy fried mole salamanders; baked canebrake rattlesnake (a 4½-foot specimen coiled around tomatoes and green peppers); and deep-fried strips of cottonmouth moccasin.

Whit Gibbons, Their Blood Runs Cold – Adventures with Reptiles and Amphibians, 12

• Natural Philosophy Field Trip pictures available: http://www.nsa.foucachon.com/natural_phil_field_trip/

• Spring Windy Pics: http://www.nsa.foucachon.com/spring_windy_06/

• Pics of the Easter Party at the Courtney’s available HERE.

He feeds our bodies through bread and other foods, he illumines the world through the sun, and he warms it through heat; yet neither bread, nor sun, nor fire, is anything save in so far as he distributes his blessings to us by these instruments. In like manner, he nourishes faith spiritually through the sacraments, whose one function is to set his promises before our eyes to be looked upon, indeed, to be guarantees of them to us.

Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book IV, Ch. 14.12

The first degree of chastity is sincere virginity; the second, faithful marriage. Therefore, the second sort of virginity is the chaste love of matrimony.

– Chrysostom, quoted in Institutes of the Christian Religion, book IV, ch. 12.28

As for our writing personally to each other, how often do you hear people complain that emails subtract the tone of voice; that it’s hard to tell if someone is joking or not? Clicking on “send” has its limitations as a system of subtle communication. Which is why, of course, people use so many dashes and italics and capitals (“I AM joking!”) to compensate. That’s why they came up with the emoticon, too–the emoticon being the greatest (or most desperate, depending how you look at it) advance in punctuation since the question mark in the reign of Charlemagne.

Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, 192 🙂

Getting your itses mixed up is the greatest solecism in the world of punctuation. No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, “Good food at it’s best”, you deserve to be struck by lighting, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.

Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, 44

Jerome commented that in the early church, when visitors used to come, they were commonly frightened at the amen–it had the sound of thunder, said by people who understood it.

Blessed be the Lord God of Israel from everlasting to everlasting: And let all the people say, Amen. Praise the Lord. (Ps. 106:48)

– Doug Wilson, Mother Kirk, 152

Here is our Gilligan’s Island Song Lyrics:

The verbs that take the dative case
With indirect command,
Are impero, mando, & persuadeo,
And persuadeo

The verbs that take accusative with Indirect Command,
Just happen to be these verbs three
Moneo, oro, rogo,
Moneo, oro, rogo.

At last we come to postulo, quaero, & peto,
These are the verbs that choose to take
Ablative with the prep.
Ablative with the prep.

And if you want the actual image, click HERE.

[EDIT] Click HERE to listen to the B Class singing the song!

The nature of the apostles’ function is clear from this command: “Go, preach the Gospel to every creature” [Mark 16:15]. No set limits are allotted to them, but the whole earth is assigned to them to bring into obedience to Christ, in order that by spreading the gospel wherever they can among the nations, they may raise up his Kingdom everywhere. Accordingly, Paul, in desiring to prove his apostleship, recalls that he did not gain any one city for Christ but propagated the gospel far and wide, and did not put his hands to another man’s foundation but planted churches where the name of the Lord was unheard [Rom. 15:19-20]. Apostles, then, were sent out to lead the world back from rebellion to true obedience to God, and to establish his Kingdom everywhere by the preaching of the gospel, or if you prefer, as the first builders of the church, to lay its foundations in all the world [1 Cor. 3:10].

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, book 4, ch. 3.4

Wine itself is quite a miracle. It’s something like the birth of a child. A man and woman mix and then create a being wholly distinct from themselves, yet with deep family traits–new and yet the same. A ripe grape contains two parts, unmarried–an interior sugar juice and an exterior skin full of yeast. But if you marry and mix these parts by crushing a grape, it will start toward creating wine, a third distinct thing, new and yet the same–a “wine that maketh glad the heart of man” (Ps. 104:15).

Doug Jones, Angels in the Architecture, 83