Canter Bridge

We parents watch attentively for the return on our investment.

Parenting is not a catch-and-release endeavor nor a spectator sport. To the contrary, our identity is wrapped up in the results. To some degree, they define us.

Those who keep the law are wise children,
but companions of gluttons shame their parents.

We have tools, with our modern discourse of individualism and our casual approach to rectitude, for letting ourselves off the hook quite quickly when our grown child runs amock. Indeed, we may have needed to react against the rigid assumptions that wrote off a parent for another adult’s deeds. Continue Reading »

When we unreflectively take ‘democracy’ as our self-evident starting point, we gain individual rights and untrammeled liberties at the loss of other blessings. The economic and social benefits of prizing liberty are so obvious that we absolutize them. We convert the gift into the god. We idolize the product rather than the maker.

We behave stupidly, mistaking the part for the whole. We become fools.

It may be impossible for us to share all the assumptions that undergird the biblical proverbs. Indeed it may be unwise. History means something and ‘originalist’ attempts to re-make our society according to an ancient blue-print always fail. We are called to be wise, not antiquarian. Continue Reading »

Our tolerant times allow us to smile wanly at the fool’s misalignment with reality, but not to savage him with demeaning words.

Not so the biblical proverbs. In the Bible’s sinecure of realism, the fool represents a rogue threat to communal health. He is not merely exercising individual preferences or making choices that one might not care to follow. He is a shredder of valuable cloth, an undiscerning revolutionary against the nourishing status quo that has taken generations to construct.

He is not, as with us, to be pitied but rather condemned and rooted out. If he will not listen, he does not only show himself without hope. He proves himself lethal. Continue Reading »