Book Review: The Life of Conrad Grebel

A book review by Todd Lewis

The Life of Conrad Grebel
By Andrew V. St. Marie & Mike Atnip

The Life of Conrad Grebel is a book in the Cross Bearer series authored by Andrew V. St Marie and Mike Atnip. This book discusses the life of Conrad Grebel within the context of the Swiss Reformation. The periods of Grebel’s life are divided into: (1) his Pre-Reformation life, (2) his Pre-Anabaptist Reformation life, and (3) his Anabaptist life. Within his Anabaptist life, we have sections discussing his personal development within the movement which comprise his missionary work and his final death.

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Contra C.S. Lewis

By Todd Lewis

Sometime in the year 1940, C.S Lewis delivered a talk entitled “Why I Am Not a Pacifist” to a now-unknown group of English pacifists, where he made his case against the practice of Christian pacifism in light of the horrors wrought by Nazi Germany. While C.S. Lewis is a beloved apologist among the Christian community today, the egregious errors and fallacies in this shoddy and poorly thought-out work has driven me to take up the pen to write a rebuttal in defense of Christian pacifism. I open by discussing Lewis’ theory of knowledge and then discuss his judgments on pacifism when he applies his theory of knowledge to this problem.

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In Defense of Christian Non-Violence

By Todd Lewis

Here I will be presenting a defense of the Christian concept of Non-Violence (not to be confused with Pacifism, which I will discuss in contradistinction to non-violence later). This paper will be divided into four sections: (1) Scriptural defense of non-violence, (2) a defense from Church tradition of non-violence, (3) an account of why the unanimous non-violence of the Church was changed, and (4) consideration and rebuttals of non-violence from Protestants (primarily theonomists), Roman Catholics, and Orthodox Christians.

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Unorthodox: Matt Parrott, Orthodoxy, and Ethno-Nationalism

By Todd Lewis

In my last run-in with Matt Parrott, his response included this cute section:

“I’m not a sola scriptura Protestant, so I’ve got a couple millennia of applied Christian tribalism and nationalism to lean on, but I’ll be a good sport here and play by his Anabaptist house rules”

This gem, coupled with a recent series of articles on Counter-Currents (CC) about the history of Russia from an ethno-nationalist perspective, I thought about this question: Is the history of the Orthodox Church friendly toward ethno-nationalism? The answer is…of course not.

 

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Mr. Parrott, Tear Down This Wall

By Brock Bellerive

“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!”

– Rudyard Kipling, The Ballad of East and West

 

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Contra the Self-Ownership Principle: The Nightmare of Libertopia

By Todd Lewis

Recently I have been reading Ed Feser’s blog entries on Murary Rothbard here:

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2009/08/rothbard-as-philosopher.html                            http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2009/08/rothbard-revisited.html

With Feser’s insights, along with my own separate inquiries facilitated by my friend Brock Bellerive, I have found Rothbard to be a very shoddy philosopher and anarcho-capitalism in general bereft of any serious intellectual firepower. The specific point that Feser was critiquing was Rothbard’s concept of self-ownership, which Feser handily disposes of with rigorous use of logic. This in turn facilitated some of my own thoughts on the self-ownership principle and found it wanting both intellectually and morally. The thrust of this paper is to show that self-ownership is both intellectually and morally bankrupt.

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Starship Troopers: A Book Review

By Todd Lewis

Having just completed my second read-through of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, I thought I would write about my thoughts on Heinlein’s political philosophy as expressed in this must-read work. Starship Troopers is one of those true gems of Science-Fiction; it uses fiction to explore something interesting about the human condition, in this case war, peace, order and duty, with little to no suspension of disbelief. There are no moments where the reader is going to think, that’s bogus! The Terran Federation has no easy victories, and a couple of sound defeats.

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Contra Parrott 2.0: Hitler Was A Modernist

By Todd Lewis

It seems clear that Matt Parrott has, like the Bourbons of old, “learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” It is clear that he did not bone-up on his critical thinking skills after that last encounter, though he had ample time to do so. As the saying goes: if you get flak, you are probably over the target. It is sad that there was more butt-hurt than logic in his response. I was hoping for something better. Clearly Mr. Parrott is responding to some other person named Todd Lewis, a creature of his own imagination. If you cut through the muddled thinking, he accuses me of being anti-white, which in reality is a WN form of signaling much akin to the SJWs. I’m not in his club. Big deal. In his words, “While his attack is directed at me, his purpose is to drive a wedge between identity and tradition.” This is the crux of his error. A logical and theological wedge was already in place from the outset of his scheme. I had nothing to do with it. The only missing piece was time, and when enough had passed, NPI slammed the door in his face. This really did happen. This was going to happen. Deal with it.

 

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Contra Traditional Youth Network: Christianity Cannot Be Hyphenated

By Todd Lewis

I’ve been following the Traditional Youth Network (TYN) for some time after my run-in with Matt Parrott over on Attack the System. For those who do not know Mr. Parrott, recall that he is Matthew Heimbach’s father in-law, and that I had exchanged a few words with Mr. Parrott over his comments on the Ken Ham/Bill Nye debate here: https://praiseoffolly.wordpress.com/contra-parrott-the-emptiness-of-third-way-anthropology/ Brief introductions aside, this paper concerns the recent schism between White Nationalists at the National Policy Institute (NPI)  and white-nationalist-Christians (or is it Christian-white-nationalists?) over at TYN. I remember an article  where Clement, The Swiss Kinist, and myself were arguing with Scott Terry about the about the prudence of TYN’s strategy of collaborating with non-Christians. I think  this question is important, for what common ground, if any, can the traditionalist Christian movement have with the New Right, White Nationalists, etc? The answer, I think, is pretty obvious: nothing. I will explain why shortly.

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Towards a True Economic Third Position

By Todd Lewis

There are at present many efforts to create a third position in economics, most of which go from the spectrum of kooky voodoo economics such as Social Credit Theory on the right and Participatory economics on the left, and essentially socialists in third position clothing such as syndicalism and fascism. The goal of this essay is not to deconstruct these false third position models, but to offer a true third position. This will essentially be similar to distributism, though I have some objections to distributism as it is now popularly formulated. For more on that, see my essay “Rethinking Christian Economics.”

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