Zach Thornton

Memento Mori

I've noticed young men are into RCC/EO because it's trendy, not bc it's true. They like the colors, buzz, & pomp of the thing. It's cooler than to settle for the simplicity of Christ & worshipping Him in Spirit & truth. It's vainglory that leads them, not the Spirit of God.

Professional sports have evolved into a form of social engineering at its finest. Total psyop. The prowess, discipline, tactical intelligence, & raw athleticism of our professional athletes would be much better deployed as elite infantry, pilots, smoke-jumpers, paramedics, coast guard rescue swimmers, linemen, police officers, combat generals, mountain rescue teams, etc. Likewise, the energy & passion of the adult sports fanatic should be channeled towards the civic sphere instead of following these demon orgs & "fantasy" games. Man up, men. They want you distracted & soft-brained, and they're doing it through #sportsball. "Football, beer, and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult." George Orwell, 1984 "Give them bread and circuses and they will never revolt." Juvenal, 100 AD

As I keep saying: “Good” men won’t fix this. But ruthless men can.

Biblical Christianity does not affirm, support, or promote homosexuality. It is an abomination from which all practicing homosexuals must repent. ***This is for all the self-professed so-called "Christian" sports commentators who are pretending not to know this truth.***

@CalebNByrd Seems like we need more guardrails against the current abuses (e.g. Anchor Babies) we're seeing, but SCOTUS isn't the right forum for adding guardrails, our limp-wristed legislatures are. Alas.

I think this is going to be lopsided in favor of birthright citizenship. Probably 6-3 or 7-2 (Kavanuagh is probably too pragmatic to support upending birthright). I think SCOTUS will be very concerned with two central issues: 1. The humanitarian crisis - How do you relitigate the tens of millions of people who were born under birthright citizenship? How do you deal with the ex post facto problem of now making them illegal? If they are not US citizens then what nations are they citizens of? 2. How do you define a "citizen"? - Is it heritage (e.g. three generations of family born in America)? What if the father's side is a 14-generation American and the mother's side only 2 generations? If birth does not create citizenship, what does?

Your list looks impressive at first glance. But it falls apart on closer inspection. It doesn't offer much support for the Catholic 73-book canon. Your first council is "Rome 382AD 73 books." I'm not sure where you picked this up, but for the last hundred years scholars have argued there's no undisputed list from the Council of Rome. The work that supposedly contains such a list is now regarded as an anonymous composition from the sixth century. Attributing it to a 382 council is a misattribution. Not off to a great start. Next you list "Hippo 393AD 73 books." We don't actually have Hippo's own records. What we know about Hippo comes from a summary prepared in 397 for Carthage. It's called the Breviarium Hipponense. Canon 36 lists the books of the canon. But read what it actually says. It opens with "nothing should be read in church under the name of the Divine Scriptures." That's a liturgical regulation about what gets read in worship. It's not a dogmatic definition of equal canonical authority. And it closes with "the church across the sea should be consulted to confirm this canon." The council didn't even treat its own list as settled. It sent it overseas for ratification. That's not how you handle something you consider infallibly defined. And as Gallagher and Meade (2017) note, the OT list "matches precisely the Old Testament promoted by Augustine," the man who planned the council, hosted it in his own city, and preached the sermon. This isn't the universal church carefully discerning the boundaries of the canon. It's one theologian's reading list getting rubber-stamped at a regional synod he organized. Ref: Gallagher, E. L., & Meade, J. D. (2017). The Biblical Canon Lists from Early Christianity. Oxford University Press. Then you list the two councils of Carthage (397/419). Carthage 397 is the council that received the Breviarium Hipponense. It reaffirmed what Hippo had done. Same list, same absence of justification. It didn't independently examine the books and arrive at its own conclusion. It accepted a four year old summary from a regional synod that had itself requested overseas confirmation. Carthage 419 reaffirmed the earlier canons again, this time folding them into a larger code of African church law. These aren't dogmatic councils solemnly defining the boundaries of divine revelation. They're regional African synods managing church administration. Not one of these councils offered a single argument for why Tobit belongs alongside Isaiah. They all just repeated the same list that originated with Augustine's influence at Hippo. Then you list "Florence 1442AD 73 books," which many Catholics treat as a slam dunk. But Florence actually undermines whatever argument you think your list is building. Yes, the books were listed. But they weren't dogmatically defined. There was no anathema attached. And it didn't settle anything. Gallagher (2025) notes that "this clear statement did not settle the matter," because observers weren't convinced Pope Eugene IV intended to resolve the ancient disputes about specific books. The list "seemed to many observers to be less binding." Debate about the deuterocanonicals didn't just continue after Florence. It intensified. Neither side of the debate even relied on the Florentine statement. If Florence had definitively settled the canon the way you're suggesting, why did the debate get worse afterward? Why did Cardinal Cajetan feel free to argue for Jerome's restricted canon in a commentary dedicated to the Pope ninety years later? Why did Seripando argue at Trent that the question of a twofold canon was still open despite Florence? Your list treats Florence as a settled data point. Ref: Gallagher, E. L. (2025). The Apocrypha through History. Oxford University Press. Then you list Trent. I've discussed it at length elsewhere, so I'll just mention the essentials. When Trent finally forced the vote on equal authority for the deuterocanonicals, the council's own best scholars voted against it. Jedin, the Catholic historian of Trent, says the minority was "outstanding for its theological scholarship." The vote was 24-15-16. That's 44% in favor. That's your infallible council. Ref: Jedin, H. (1961). A History of the Council of Trent, vol. 2. Thomas Nelson. Lastly, you say Protestants "removed" seven books. But that's not the right question. The restricted canon is older than every council on your list. It's the canon of the Hebrew Bible, received by the Jewish community, endorsed by Christ, defended by Jerome, maintained by the Glossa Ordinaria, affirmed by Hugh of St. Victor, and argued for by the Church's own top Thomist in 1532. The real question is why Trent needed an anathema to stop people from noticing what Jerome noticed. If these books had the same stuff as Genesis and Isaiah, you wouldn't need an anathema. You'd point to the texts. They couldn't. So they voted.

Podcasts have created incredible opportunities. At the same time, it's opened the door to some of the most incredibly stupid takes imaginable. Case in point.

PSA: You do not have to have an opinion about everything.

@jonharris1989 It was Doug Wilson that I remember saying "You know you’re over the target when you start catching flak". But if you make "flak" a primary success metric, I think this behavior becomes inevitable; you have to keep upsetting people to get "flak".

There seems to be a weird moral masochism on this app whereby someone feels the need for betrayal so much they’ll manufacture it because it’s such a core part of their identity. It’s strange. I’m not the first to sense this. What makes sense of someone purity spiraling Hitler appreciation into a litmus test? Either someone is so misguided they think it’s a courageous and prudent stand or they must have a need to be rejected to prove something.

What Herbert and Villeneuve intended with their work is irrelevant because that's not what their work said. Authorial intent has limits when the text is finally presented. Don't write a hero then say, "Actually he's the villain." It doesn't work that way.

Small group leaders are not pastors. If you don’t have enough pastors or elders, vocational or non vocational, to effectively pastor every soul in your church, plant. That’s how you know your church is too big. When you can’t effectively shepherd the body.

If you homeschool your children from Kindergarten to 12th grade, you get 16k more hours with them than if they had attended school. How can that not matter?! What a gift.

@CalebNByrd Absolute Chad.

This guy is a hero.

Some may have misinterpreted the gif. Those are tears of joy. Indian food is gross

The Indian restaurant in my town went out of business

@CalebNByrd Contradicting the ERLC too. I love it.

I cannot express how incredible this is. There will be no black-pilling!

@CalebNByrd If Harvard produces men like Merrick Garland, of what use is Harvard?

Yall this is what we're up against. We could win if we would only try.

You should ignore writers when they talk about what their writing "really means", because they're usually wrong. Frank Herbert wrote Dune as a warning against messianic figures, and against the concept of heroes themselves. He was frustrated people didn't understand this so in Dune Messiah he has Paul Atreides quote Hitler. But the truth is Herbert didn't understand. You can't ignore the rules of reality just because you insist they are wrong. Dune is an awesome story about the triumph of heroes because heroes as a concept is real, and cannot be destroyed.

Yup.