The Garrett Ashley Mullet Show

My neighbor two houses down recently sent me a Mere Fidelity podcast episode interviewing ‘What’s Wrong with Rights?’ author Dr. Nigel Biggar. While I'm glad to have gotten the episode, I did not at all care for the dismissive attitude toward even the concept of natural rights which Dr. Biggar communicated. It seems Dr. Biggar has only two categories for conversations about rights – statements of...

How should Christians relate to beauty and ugliness? For that matter, how should followers of Jesus relate to truth and falsehood? To begin to answer these questions, I look to Philippians 4:5-9 where the Apostle Paul writes about what we think about and how we feel, as well as what our expectation of benefit should be when our hearts and our minds are oriented and calibrated correctly. "Let your...

As of this past week, several news items caught my attention along similar lines.  For starters, Joel Abbott at Not the Bee reported on journalist Tom Elliott putting together inflammatory political rhetoric from leftists over the couple of weeks. Paul Sacca at The Blaze reported on an 84-year-old pro-life volunteer being shot in Michigan after she had a 'heated' exchange, and Dave Urbanski a...

Yesterday I finished 'Paul: A Biography' by N.T. Wright, and I want to tell you all about it. Rest assured, I have more to say than just that it was "so good and super convicting." In all seriousness, though, as far as biographies go, I thought this was a particularly well-written and interesting one. But, yes, I do admit to knowing there is a lot of controversy concerning Tom Wright and his persp...

Wednesday, July 20th, my cell phone rang. A number I didn't recognize showed up, and I answered. On the other end was Arren Kimbel-Sannit, a reporter with Montana Free Press in Helena. He wanted to know if I had time for an interview regarding J.D. Hall. I still want to know how he got my number. Nevertheless, on September 13th, the result of that interview and Arren's other investigations were pu...

What is ideology, per se? And what is an ideologue? And are we entirely sure these are bad things to be or have? Definition of ideology (from Merriam-Webster) 1a: a manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual, group, or culture b: the integrated assertions, theories and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program c: a systematic body of concepts especially about human life...

Much animated discussion of church polity this past week has me wanting to delve into what the various general arrangements in Christendom are, where they come from, and what we should make of them. In this episode, I should like to share several resources with you - from the Encyclopedia Britannica , The Gospel Coalition , Theopedia , and GotQuestions.org - concerning the various schools of thoug...

I hear a lot of talk in our day about unity. As a citizen of the United States of America, it’s even embedded in the name of my native country. But I hear calls for unity in the American Church in particular. And this leads me to a simple question. What is unity? And what are we to make of calls for being united? In searching the ESV for the word, I came across four results – one in the Old Testam...

Following up on our last episode, JP Chavez shared a thought with me regarding Doug Wilson and what to make of him, asking whether we should be more suspicious of 94 ecclesiastical charges being brought against Wilson in his own denomination, CREC, then all 94 charges being dropped. The short answer is that I think JP is right, and we should be more suspicious, and I should have made more of this...

My wife Lauren recently sent me a link on Facebook to a post by a certain Facebook page which seems dedicated to exposing all the worst and nastiest scandals related to Moscow, Idaho pastor Doug Wilson. Titled 'A Timeline of Controversial Pastor Douglas Wilson of Moscow, Idaho,' there is an ever-loving lot of material here, complete with many insinuations as well as several links. Having some expe...

Before we delve into the Old Testament book of Ezekiel in this episode, be warned that we will be talking here about subjects which some parents might not want their children hearing about just yet, so I tell you up-front lest I offend anyone’s sensibilities by surprise. That said, I just this week learned about an old Jewish rabbinical tradition that men under 30 years old were not allowed to rea...

Credentialism is our word of the day. And why it matters is that there is an ignorance, folly, and hubris in assuming that everyone needs to go to college in order to do well professionally, or amount to something. In our day, there are far too many credentials handed out for the money, but not as much for their merit or that of those who will hold those credentials. And for some reason we seem to...

"The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown." So says Genesis 6:4 in the ESV. But what does it mean, and who were the sons of God? We basically have two sets of answers – the first is boring, and the second is exciting. In what I w...

A friend of a friend asks you if the following statement is true according to your beliefs: ' God does not love you because you do good works, but rather, that you do good works because God bestows that gift to you.' The short answer is 'Yes.' The longer answer is found in John 14:15 and 1 John 4:19. “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” And also, “We love because He first loved us.” He...

If you voted for and supported former President Donald Trump, and would do so again, the speech current President Joe Biden gave in Philadelphia this past Thursday is a warning. Not only do the Democrat and Republican establishment see you as wrong, they see you as dangerous. More specifically, they see you as a threat to their vision of the American Republic. What will they do under such auspices...

Gradually making my way through ‘Summa Theologica: Volume I’ on audiobook, yesterday’s reading featured Aquinas talking about eternity and time. Consequently, here’s a mind-blowing idea for you: God is His own eternity. But what does that mean? I confess to not fully knowing.  Even so, these are not useless or trivial ideas to contemplate. Aquinas stands as the last great medieval scholar of theol...

Should we fight all the time, and always be criticizing, and ever only be against things? Some, who at least think they are good at fighting, and take up polemics as a matter of course, yet seem not to know anything other than war, demonstrate by their actions and ways of relating that their answer is 'yes.' Polemics, by the way, is contentious rhetoric, deriving its name from the Ancient Greek wo...

Some charming quotes this week from Democrats – including one current governor, one candidate for governor, and even the President of the United States - with regards to Republicans are worth a glance. “And we are here to say that the era of Trump, and Zeldin and Molinaro, just jump on a bus and head down to Florida where you belong, ok?” “Get out of town. Because you do not represent our values....

Sometimes God’s people suffer for the sake of righteousness. When that is the case, we are called to not be afraid of those who would punish righteousness from corrupt motives. Instead, we are to prioritize, and to make preparation for, answering accusers with gentleness and respect, and with a good conscience, so that those who hate our good behavior in Christ will be ashamed of themselves. Other...

This past week, Not the Bee posted a resurfaced 1989 clip of George Soros and Joe Biden talking about the "de-nationalization" and "radical reorganization" of economies. The two were specifically addressing Poland after the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of communism – at least predicated on the Soviet expression of it. It's surreal to see a much younger Soros – who in our day is probab...

Is motherhood a woman’s highest calling? It is, according to someone Jen Oshman - author of Cultural Counterfeits - encountered at a baby shower a few years ago. As she wrote in a blog post for Crossway.org on August 1st of this year, the statement hit her like a slap in the face since one friend she had with her at the event was single and longed to be married, and another friend she had with her...

Preferring a narrowly defined gospel, why have so many American evangelicals in recent decades not invested more in intellectual pursuits? Mark A. Noll here in 'The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind' wants to know, and we should want to know along with him. As he opens, "The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind."  Yet there are a few surprising gems here....

My cousin Tim Mullet recently answered my question about examples in the Old or New Testaments of God's people rebuking one another for emotions. Let us consider, then, the deaths of Nadab and Abihu in Leviticus 10, as well as the death of Absalom in 2 Samuel 18-19:15, since those are the examples Tim has submitted for consideration.  As Tim rightly points out, Moses and Joab spoke to Aaron a...

Famed Welsh preacher and physician Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899-1981), in a sermon series on Romans 1 which he started in 1958, once had this to say about why Hitler had never worried him.  “I was never worried for a second about a man like Hitler; it was enough for me to read the thirty-seventh Psalm, and there I read of a man like him spreading himself like a green bay tree, a sort of colossus...

We need to take a look at the cost-benefit to the American people for the FBI, DOJ, IRS, USDA, and CDC, and other similar departments, bureaus, services, agencies, and centers. And would it be a good thing on the whole if some of these federal agencies were abolished entirely? There is no disputing they separately and together represent a kind of supra-governmental force in American public and pri...