Growing In Grace

Many years have passed since the infamous  Screwtape Letters. After Wormwood was able to calm his uncle and avoid being devoured, he slowly advanced up the ranks. Eventually he moved into a different role where he organized mass attacks on Christianity as a whole. In his farewell memo he seeks to pass on the particulars of his most successful strike.  As I am quickly approaching retirement it is my aim to document what is perhaps the most effective campaign I was able to employ against the Enemy's book. Of course there have been many great attacks on the Enemy's book over the years. Anything we can do to weaken their perverse love for that evil text will vastly improve our efforts.  I am reminded of the many we led astray by focusing our attacks on convincing certain "scholars" to deny the reliability of the Enemy's book. We bolstered the platform of men like Bart Ehrman which enabled us to turn many away from even reading the book. Many children who grew ...

On my drive home today while at a stoplight I noticed a bumpersticker on the car in front of me which read: "Just say NO to Negativity."  It made me wonder, when the phrase was first coined did the originator crack a wry smile? Were they able to think past the end of their nose so as to see the irony? Perhaps they were having a bit of fun with those who would glom on to the phrase without thinking it through? I wonder if the driver understood that they were advertising the denial of negativity with the use of a capitalized negation? There are, of course, only two possibilities: either they fully understood the word play and employed it with ironic intentionality, or, perhaps more likely, they merely loved the idea of promoting positivity and so their use of a negative for negating negativity went unrecognized. If the phrase was used in ignorance we could join in with the cry, "Precision of language," a repeated phrase from the great young adults dystopian nov...