Amy Hartmann

[Annie Crawford @annielcrawford]

We want education to be cheap and efficient and mechanizable when in reality it is costly and slow and profoundly personal. No technology will ever change this, for education is fundamentally a spiritual endeavor.

It is enculturation, the bequeathing of loves, the imparting of vision, the participation in communal tradition. Such things cannot be commercialized or mass produced without destroying what they are.

[Amy Hartmann @AmyEHartmann]

@idkmybffjade @ChandlerForPB To which the answer would be “dressed like that? No!”😂

[Amy Hartmann @AmyEHartmann]

@benzornes Just watched this with my kids. This movie is wild. I 1000% recommend watching it again as an adult.

[Amy Hartmann @AmyEHartmann]

@BenZeisloft @JamesGaius @BaptistLeaders Temples of Moloch indeed. So is that why they see nothing wrong with protecting them as a place of worship.

[Amy Hartmann @AmyEHartmann]

Literally no one
KSP: I got Jane Austen in the Bible!!! Merry Christmas!
Make Bibles Bibles Again

[Karen Swallow Prior (Notorious KSP) @KSPrior]

This new edition of the CSB Women’s Study Bible has been years in the making. I wrote several biographical entries for it, including one on Hannah More and one on Jane Austen. My copy just arrived today, hot off the presses. (I got Jane Austen in the Bible!!!) Merry Christmas! 🎄

[Amy Hartmann @AmyEHartmann]

@uribrito “He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision.”
Psalm 2:4 ESV

[Amy Hartmann @AmyEHartmann]

@uribrito That’s really hilarious. I’m sure it was just the 80’s 😉

[Uriesou Brito @uribrito]

The late Gary North, whom I had the pleasure of meeting on a couple of occasions, warned that conspiracy-obsession is the new eschatology for Christians who’ve forgotten their Bibles. It turns saints into doomscrollers instead of dominion-takers.

Of course, I agree that North's 2000 tech crisis was a failure to apply his 1986 conspiracy thesis. Nevertheless, his labor remains the most cogent and comprehensive on this topic, especially for its depth in the biblical text.

For North, conspiracies breed a kind of political despair that paralyzes the hands and poisons the imagination. Instead of building schools, churches, and joyful households, men waste their days deciphering digital hieroglyphics, layering narrative upon narrative that can only be undone if someone dedicates hundreds of hours to original material. The longer someone remains in this world, the higher the walls are built, preventing them from seeing reality as it should be.

I remember once listening to the late Walter Martin, who spent decades answering cultic arguments. He concluded that cults “get an F in theology” because they elevate fringe ideas (diet, prophecy date-setting, secret knowledge) to prominence. We have seen the same applied to a host of people within the X ecosystem.

North's concerns are not so much with skepticism towards political policies, sociological agendas, etc. He shared many of these. But at its core, he argued, conspiratorial thinking often treats Satan, or some cabal of elites, as more sovereign than the God who sits enthroned above the circle of the earth.

[Uriesou Brito @uribrito]

Jesus is Lord!

But this is not an enticement to utopianism but to incremental societal changes, just as we expect to see in our own sanctification. Immediatism is an over-realized eschatology.

James B. Jordan wrote a superb essay some decades ago titled “Yuppie Postmillennialism,” criticizing those who believed victory would come without suffering or complex decisions. He observes:

"If we are to have a true Christian renaissance in the United States, it will not be a superficial yuppiefied religion that brings it. True Christianity must have equal time for Ecclesiastes as for Proverbs in its One Year Bibles."

This is quite a sobering warning for us in the days and weeks ahead. We live in a fallen world, which means that if we think we can bring in the kingdom in our own way and through our own strength and perfectionist tendencies, we are utopianizing history.

But the right way to view history is to acknowledge that we live in the vaporousness of Solomon's Ecclesiastes, and the triumph of Jesus' Ascension. Therefore, we need wisdom, confidence, discernment, and patience to make God’s blessings known far as the curse is found.

[Amy Hartmann @AmyEHartmann]

A fair and balanced response

[Uriesou Brito @uribrito]

A few comments on Trueman's "Goodbye, Big Eva," Hello, "Gig Eva:"

a) Trueman's original "Big Eva" was a distillation of the conspicuous sentiment that there was a marketplace for the soul that was distant from the local church. There was an economy of life that sang psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, not within the ecclesiastical needs of the community, but rather outside them. As Trueman defines it,

"The rise of big conference platforms and the promotion of certain speakers—which I called “celebrity pastors”—that supplanted or subverted the role of local congregations, ministers, and denominations in shaping church policy."

The Big Eva of 2014 elevated establishmentment evangelicals who viewed their role as a supplanter of local authority, and "consciously leveraged their public platforms to exert influence beyond their church, thereby weakening it." The goal was to create a para-church paradise where all trends and moods were tested and tried by the keepers of that inn. The local minister, dutifully fulfilling his role, lacked the gravitas to undertake such a noble task.

[Abigail Dodds @abigaildodds]

Ok, I read the Gig Eva article. Here's my bone to pick--Trueman uses Middlemarch's Will Ladislaw as analogy for the new Gig Eva which he describes as a sort of un-credentialed, unproven-via-local-church, hyper online platform builders, who are rewarded for personal attacks w no need of personal competence. So far so good.

But the Will Ladislaw reference presents an irony and possible blindspot. Ladislaw, for my part, is not a good guy, even tho he's a secondary protagonist in the book. He's adrift, proud, his morals lack clarity in significant ways. But the one thing he sees with crystalline clarity is the fraud of a man, Causabon (who is his elder cousin).

Causabon is a self-serious, self-important, seemingly meek and neurotic introvert. And he is wasting his life on this "key to all mythologies." The scholarship has passed him by, but he doesn't even know it because he doesn't speak German and much of the movement forward in his field has been done in German. Ladislaw attempts to help Causabon see it and instead earns his utter contempt. 1/2

[Amy Hartmann @AmyEHartmann]

@thespearing This is great 😂

[Andy Naselli @AndyNaselli]

David Bahnsen explains how to educate students in light of AI. (This is what @BCS_MN does.) https://t.co/otUTh9LCAM

[Josh Daws @JoshDaws]

Third-wayism turns neutrality into a virtue and sidelines Christians in important cultural battles by convincing them that opposing the overwhelming wickedness on the left creates obstacles to evangelism.

[Michael Foster @thisisfoster]

Every half-decent pastor I know gets counsel from his wife or godly older women when he needs insight into shepherding a woman's issue.

He does it just by asking. It's easy.

It doesn't require creating a nominated, trained, initiated, and commissioned board of women leaders.

[Amy Hartmann @AmyEHartmann]

@mroppizzi @PerfInjust 1 Cor 13

[Anthony Esolen @AnthonyEsolen]

The assassination of Charlie Kirk, a national public figure for his words and his arguments and not for any public office, on a public campus, in the middle of engaging in gentlemanly public debate, is not like any assassination in my lifetime.

Because he was not a sitting president or premier, nor running for such an office, it was not like the assassinations of JFK, RFK, Anwar Sadat, or Aldo Moro. There, you have the obvious motive of cancelling out someone who by virtue of the office wields or might wield enormous power. You also have the motive of throwing a nation into confusion.

Because Kirk was a SPEAKER, and because it was only his speaking that made him a target, and nothing personal, his assassination was not like that of George Moscone and Harvey Milk.

Because Kirk was not himself embroiled in a struggle for power, his assassination was not like that of Jock Yablonski and his family.

Because Kirk was not a leader in a Church whom political thugs were afraid of, his assassination was not like that of Fr. Jerzy Popieluszko. Because his assassin was not a tool of the powers that be, his assassination was not like that of Bishop Oscar Romero.

The assassination took aim directly at freedom of inquiry, speech, and argument, and in a place where those freedoms are supposed to be sacrosanct. But we know that college campuses seldom honor those freedoms now; men drinking beer at the counter of a bar enjoy more freedom of speech than does a student in an Introduction to Sociology class at Land Grant University. FAR more.

Our schools, right from the start, stoke political passions, the most unruly and unreasonable of them all, stronger in hating than in revering. Of course, given that the Left runs them, the passions come overwhelmingly from one side. But that is not what schools are for. People who are fuming or shouting can't learn -- they don't have the leisure for it. I've been a college professor since 1988, and I can say with flat confidence that I've never used my class as a soapbox for any political passion; it's not my job, and it would alienate a lot of young people to whom I want to introduce Dante, or Milton, or Homer, or Michelangelo, or Wordsworth, or Pascal... But professors who say, as I heard one such in 1991, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, that "Teaching is a political act," meaning not that teaching concerns the common good, but that teaching must be political in the narrower sense of political movements and political partisanship, are less interested in Dante than in The Cause. They do not do their jobs. I'll add that the poorest of professors lean that way, because they aren't very good at teaching literature, or whatever they are supposed to investigate, for its own sake.

[Matt Kennedy @lambeth981]

"What makes women unhappy (I think) is the continual satanic assault on transcendent spiritual reality (God) and on the biological realities of women. What makes women miserable is having to perform slave-wage labor that keeps them just rich enough to feel important, but too poor to produce anything lasting, like a family. What makes women sad are all the bizarre beliefs about men and what can be expected if you happen to marry one. What makes women really really sad is the big lie that having a baby will impede progress toward you being you. There are so many things that are making women sad, there’s almost not enough time in the day to number them. And Beth Allison Barr, it seems to me, not only believes almost all of them, but thinks all the women in the church you go to should believe them as well." Anne Kennedy, link below

[Amy Hartmann @AmyEHartmann]

@Dale_stenberg @WBLittlejohn This is great news! I’m so thankful -tears of joyous relief. One huge step in the right direction.

[Amy Hartmann @AmyEHartmann]

My Dear Hemlock is a book that I didn’t want to put down, but is probably better read slowly as it has many heart check moments throughout. Go buy yourself a copy, it is a very timely book that I think every woman should read. https://t.co/pOlLDSHRzR