10/20/2020
A recent survey has found that nearly a third of self-described evangelicals do not believe that Jesus Christ is truly God.
10/19/2020
Last week, federal court judge Salvador Mendoza, an Obama appointee, blocked the state of Washington from automatically banning those with religiously based objections to department policy from becoming foster parents.
The department’s policies, wrote Mendoza, only burdens “potential caregivers with sincere religious beliefs,” since those with religious beliefs are likely to object to the policy. Even more, these policies probably “favor certain secular viewpoints over certain religious viewpoints,” which is also a violation of religious liberties.
10/16/2020
In a new analysis, scienists ask a simple question: Can we detect “fine-tuning” in biology as we can in physics? In answering this question the scientists found for the first time, a statistical framework for determining whether certain features in living things are fine-tuned or were “evolve-able.” Using this method, they demonstrate how functional proteins, cellular networks, and the biochemical machines found in cells exhibit evidence of “design.”
10/15/2020
Our culture-wide unfamiliarity with the great books can be directly attributed it our culture-wide unfamiliarity with the Good Book. An undergrad from a small liberal-arts school, Abel is consistently surprised that his peers do not know even the best-known accounts in the Bible.
10/14/2020
Our next Colson Center Short Course looks at four Christians -- the great Church Father St. Augustine of Hippo, Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the novelist Flannery O’Connor, and Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr -- each of whom navigated through difficult cultural events. The course is titled “How Four Christians from History Confronted Cultural Chaos,” and begins next Tuesday, October 20th, and continues each Tuesday (except for election night) through November 17th.
10/13/2020
On July 1, Virginia enacted the “Virginia Values Act,” which bans discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. A companion law requires employers to include coverage for sex reassignment and “gender affirming” surgeries in their health plans. The Act provides an exemption for religious schools “owned, supported, controlled, or managed” by denominations or churches, but the exemption is severely limited.
10/12/2020
Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their creation of the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR.
10/08/2020
At the local level, our ballots decide more than just what taxes we pay, what resources schools receive, which roads are fixed, and the size of the police force. Today, our votes determine what behavior is incentivized by the state, what worldview is taught as fact in our schools, and in some places, which laws police will enforce.
10/07/2020
Since 2009, the number of embryonic stem-cell lines approved for federally funded research has grown from 60 to 484. Embryos were destroyed to create those new stem cell lines, and our federal tax dollars paid for it.
10/06/2020
World Rugby was evaluating the idea of letting trangender girls and women compete against biological girls and women in sports. In considering the idea, it appears that World Rugby has decided that trans athletes are at an advantage because of their biological build and will therefore not be permitted to participate in athletic compeitions for genders opposite of thier bological gender.
10/05/2020
A few weeks ago, a friend and listener asked what questions Christians should ask candidates. Because there is no perfect candidate but so many issues, casting an informed vote requires research. Since most of us will never get the opportunity to question presidential candidates (apparently, even if we were moderating the debates), we should be able to know how they might answer the questions based on the statements of public record.
10/02/2020
While the cultural indicators do point, I believe, to the further mainstreaming of pedophilia, a Christian worldview places even the most chaotic and distressing of moments within a larger Story. Christ has risen from the dead. He is Lord. And, He is making all things new. Thus, as Christian philosopher Alvin Pantinga reminds us, whenever we talk of evil, we are talking about a very real foe. But a defeated foe.
10/01/2020
During the debate, my friend Trevin Wax tweeted, “Neil. Postman. He saw this coming forty years ago,” referring to how the author of Amusing Ourselves to Death, who described what happens in societies when societies entertainment replaces truth and celebrity-ism replaces virtue.
09/30/2020
Growing up in families without married parents, their well-being sacrificed for the sake of adult happiness, the kids have been the primary victims of our sexual experimentation. To cover our tracks, we’ve resorted to indoctrination, attempting to convince them of other myths, such as the idea that biological sex and their physical bodies are fully malleable. Kids today are literally taught to be skeptical of how they were made.
09/29/2020
At root, there’s more to this hatred of SCOTUS nominee Amy Coney Barrett than the legitimate disagreements and debate inherent to the nomination process. There’s even more to it than being potentially the third appointee of a President despised by so many. The savage incivility already being directed at Barrett can be traced back to Roe v. Wade. As Kim Colby, legal scholar for Christian Legal Society suggested last week on the BreakPoint podcast, the decision to legalize abortion has poisoned our political system and escalated court nominations to literal life and death issues.
09/28/2020
In one of our latest “What Would You Say?” videos, my colleague Brooke McIntire takes on the myth of “settled science.” Proposing and overturning theories is an ongoing part of the process. Even longstanding scientific consensus is vulnerable to new and contrary evidence, and scientists are fallible and biased human beings too.
09/25/2020
Dutch physician Bert Keizer seems to be having second thoughts about the deadly system he helped create. He is especially alarmed at the developments in Great Britain, where Conservative member of parliament Andrew Mitchell predicted that euthanasia could be legal there by 2025.
09/24/2020
This Sunday, September 27, hundreds of churches throughout America will be participating in a time dedicated to prayer and repentance. What’s being called “Repentance Sunday” has been organized and endorsed by the leaders from more than 50 churches and ministries.
09/23/2020
President Trump says he will announce his nominee for the Supreme Court by Saturday.
09/22/2020
Christians have both a civic and a Christian responsibility to vote. As my friend Tim Goeglin, vice-president of external and governmental relations for Focus on the Family, put it recently, to vote is the beginning of our civic duty of Christians.
09/21/2020
Historical ignorance not only prevents us from learning from the evils of the past, we risk not even being able to recognize the evils of the past when they reemerge in our time.
09/18/2020
In an event on Wednesday, Benjamin Watson, Rep. Tusi Gabbard and others called for the U.S. to send aid to Nigeria to help persecuted Christians.
09/17/2020
Two-thousand-and-twenty has been dubbed the "lost year" by some. But is there such a thing? This moment God has determined for us is challenging and chaotic. But He also determined us for this moment. And He’s with us.
09/16/2020
When President Trump endorsed the First Step Act, he said, “We’re all better off when former inmates can receive and re-enter society as law-abiding, productive citizens.” At last month’s Republican National Convention, Ivanka Trump called the First Step Act “the most significant criminal justice reform of our generation.”
09/15/2020
Over the next 12 weeks or so, with election season in full gear, we’ve planned a set of videos to tackle the various political and policy questions and issues that are front and center on people’s minds. These videos will not only equip Christians for conversations about the presidential campaign and the place of faith in the public square, but also about those issues central to state and local ballots, including abortion restrictions, education, economics, race, and civic responsibility.
09/14/2020
“Christianity,” however, as a revealed worldview, has an objective definition. Christianity centers ultimate reality and, therefore, ultimate authority, outside (not within) the created order, locates it in a Divine Personal Being who has made Himself known through what He has made, through Holy Scripture, and ultimately made known Himself through Christ Jesus. One might doubt that there is a God who has revealed Himself or that God has revealed Himself in these ways, and therefore reject Christianity. But because Christianity is a worldview that comes already carefully defined, it’s not open to mass-scale revisions.
09/11/2020
The sincere desire to eradicate dangerous genetic diseases is understandable, and even noble. The longing to heal reflects God’s image in us. Ethically sound and medically safe treatments should be pursued, but we should never proceed without full awareness of the human temptation to “become like God” as Genesis 3 tells us, “determining good and evil.”
09/10/2020
According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, child sex trafficking includes the “recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, obtaining or advertising of a minor child for the purpose of a commercial sex act.” Of the roughly 24-thousand endangered runaways reported last year, estimates are that one in six were victims of sex trafficking. Often, traffickers are family members or family friends, such as parents who’ve lost custody or guardians looking to profit.
09/09/2020
Initially receiving rave reviews, feedback on Disney's live action Mulan has chilled considerably after reports that Disney filmed substantial portions of the movie in China’s Xinjiang province, with the blessing and cooperation of the Chinese Communist government.
Xinjiang is the home province of some 12 million Muslim Uighurs that live in China. According to the U. S. State Department, over one million of them have been moved to concentration camps where “they are starved, abused, tortured, electrocuted, raped and even killed.”
09/08/2020
Our culture’s disdain for and impatience with the disabled is just another example of what happens when life is devalued. Sometimes, it’s overt and cruel and other times, it takes the form of regarding those with disabilities as burdens and annoyances.
09/04/2020
Everything good and right and true exists in the light, according to Ephesians 5. Evil tries to hide itself, and hidden evil flourishes. Everything the abortion industry tries to hide, including the humanity of the fetus and the reality that this “procedure” kills, and just how brutal it is, we must expose.
09/03/2020
America has long been fertile ground for the creating and spreading of conspiracy theories. Sadly, however, QAnon, which offers a fear-based narrative, is finding fertile soil in churches.
09/02/2020
Recently, the Intercept reported that Lenovo, the world’s largest manufacturer of laptops, “has imported an estimated 258,000 laptops” built by a certain Chinese manufacturer named Hefei Bitland. Through this manufacturer, Lenovo “participates in a Chinese government program that provides factories with cheap labor from persecuted Uighurs.” “Cheap labor,” in this case, means “forced labor.”
09/01/2020
As Paul told the Ephesians, “we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” Those forces are at work anytime there is dehumanizing injustice, in any form, including when peaceful protest becomes indiscriminate violence. And that’s why the Church must be the church, Christians must have a worldview big enough to understand that, in this case, neither politics nor policy offer long-term solutions.
08/31/2020
The difference between millions of people dying every day by natural causes and those who die by murder is intent. It is wrong to take an innocent human life… any innocent human life. Fertilized eggs, embryos, fetuses, newborns, teenagers and adults are all human beings.
08/28/2020
The anger directed at the Perrys reflects a sad fatalism that permeates both the LGBTQ movement and the so-called “gay-affirming” Christians. Their critique is rooted in a bad idea...
08/27/2020
After a college professor warned students in her syllabus that speaking out against a battery of social issues, including abortion and transgenderism among other things, would be grounds for dismissal from the class, the university stepped in and told the professor that she must change her syllabus as it hinders students' first amendment rights.
08/26/2020
A plane is most free not when I drive it, but when I fly it. That’s what is designed for. The same is true of human sexuality. We are not most free when we do whatever we want, but only when we are what God created us to be.
08/25/2020
For years now, experts have warned of the so-called “deaths from despair,” describing the increased rates of mental illness, depression, and addictions among many population segments in our country. In addition to these, however, there’s another pre-existing condition that often goes unmentioned: American hyper-individualism.
08/24/2020
John Stonestreet interviews Stephen Enada, director of the International Committee on Nigeria (ICON) about ICON’s dramatic new campaign “Nigeria’s Silent Slaughter” to raise awareness and bring pressure to bear on the Nigerian government.
08/21/2020
Sophie Scholl and her brother fought back against the Nazis in the 1940s. The Scholls were later captured and executed. The Scholl siblings refused to flee from their culture, as we are tempted to do today, and as such likely saved many lives.
08/20/2020
Most Americans take the existence of human rights for granted. We see them, to borrow a phrase, as “self-evident.” We can’t really imagine a world without them, or we look at places like China or North Korea with incredulity, as if it’s obvious that their way is clearly wrong. Instead, what these countries demonstrate is that there’s nothing “natural” about the idea of human rights. Rather they are the products of Judeo-Christian beliefs about the intrinsic dignity of the human person.
08/19/2020
While a large percentage of Americans dislike abortion, they are uncomfortable with making abortion illegal, a new study shows. Even those who think that abortion should be legal know that something wrong with it. And yet, they simply can’t imagine an alternative to the status quo.
08/18/2020
“Freedom of expression is in crisis,” the Philadelphia Statement begins. “Truly open discourse—the debates, exchange of ideas, and arguments on which the health and flourishing of a democratic republic crucially depend—is increasingly rare. Ideologues demonize opponents to block debates on important issues and to silence people with whom they disagree.”
This paragraph is an answer to the well-meaning Christians who, at times, ask whether it is appropriate to be involved in “political debates” over things like free speech or religious freedom. Part of the Christian’s calling is to steward and protect good things. Freedom of expression is one of those good things, and not just for us.
08/17/2020
According to a report, the “293 cases of persecution against Christians reported in the first six months of 2020 included five religious-motivated rapes and six religiously-motivated murders.”
08/14/2020
The next opportunity for the church to, as Chuck Colson often said, “be the church,” is to parents and children as the school year starts. “The Church that figures out how to care for kids and parents,” Pastor Rick argued, “will have the ear of America.” I think he’s right, and even more, I needed to be reminded that despite all the chaos of this culture moment, the work of the Church cannot be stopped.
08/13/2020
In an age of information, “extremely online people,” meaning those who rely primarily on social media for their political news, are among the least informed and most easily-deceived groups in America.
08/12/2020
According to a study conducted last week, people who struggle to identify with their biological sex are at a higher risk of struggling from mental-health disorders. In fact, they are “more than six times as likely to have been hospitalized after a suicide attempt” as others.
This study was not the first to highlight the significant rates of depression and suicidal ideation among those who struggle with gender dysphoria. In fact, the high correlation between mental health struggles and the transgender community is agreed upon by all sides. Incredibly contentious, on the other hand, is the best way to help these people.
08/11/2020
One problem with the sperm donation industry is that it dehumanizes men and children. The God-given ability to procreate is transformed into a crude financial transaction. As is the case with egg donation, the way the “product” is marketed dehumanizes image-bearers, reducing them to a list of so-called “desirable qualities, such as height, hair color; supposed athletic ability, or where they went to college. This isn’t some “enlightened” new way to make a modern family. It’s re-branded eugenics.
08/10/2020
Christian education begins with Christian assumptions about life and the world, aims for Christian goals, and is governed by Christian methodologies. In both their personal beliefs and their public lives, we hope to help students love God with heart, mind, soul and strength, and love their neighbors as themselves. Like all of us, Christian educators need ongoing training and tailored professional development to serve the unique challenges of their vocation.
To serve this incredibly important calling, the Colson Center has partnered with the Association of Christian Schools International and the International Alliance for Christian Education, two leading Christian education organizations, to offer a free, online, professional development program for schools and homeschool parents called “Worldviews and Cultural Fluency.”
08/07/2020
“The issue of abortion,” says Obianuju Ekeocha, the founder of Culture of Life Africa, “has already been decided by many African countries (who) have decided that abortion is an attack on human life at its earliest stages.” On top of that, African culture includes a strong preference for large families.
Rejecting African values and culture, Western abortion advocates instead parallel the worst colonialists of the 19th-Century who claimed to bring “Civilization, Christianity, and Commerce” to unenlightened natives.
08/06/2020
Each Wednesday morning between August 12 and November 4, which is the morning after the 2020 election, the Colson Center will host a national prayer time, via webinar. We invite you to join us, each week, to pray first and foremost for God’s mercy, that He would revive His church, that He would bring about renewal of righteousness, that He would empower us to courageously offer protection for the most vulnerable, to champion reconciliation across our deepest divides, and that He would allow us to be instruments in the sustaining of religious freedom and the national recovery of the family.
08/05/2020
Physician-assisted suicide is on the rise around the world. In his book The Thanatos Syndrome, Walker Percy described how a society devolves to the point of thinking that killing patients instead of healing them is compassionate.
08/04/2020
Beijing’s treatment of the Uighur minority in Xinjiang Province qualifies, in every way, as genocide. Writing in Newsweek, Israeli Human Rights Lawyer Arsen Ostrovsky didn’t hesitate to call the Communist Party’s actions “genocide,” pointing especially to the “forced sterilizations, abortions and intrusive birth prevention.” These actions alone meet the requirement for genocide and have led to “the population growth rates in the two largest Uyghur prefectures [to fall] by 84% between 2015 and 2018.”
08/03/2020
While we all must navigate the issues of race, sexuality and gender, criminal justice, political divisions, and other markers of our fallen human nature that dominate this cultural moment, pastors face expectations that many of us don’t. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this phrase on social media recently: “If your pastor doesn’t preach about X from the pulpit this Sunday, it’s time to find a new church.” Same phrase, but the X changes with the headlines.
07/31/2020
According to the BBC, the rate of population growth is plummeting and is expected to drop below the rate required to maintain a stable population by 2100.
07/30/2020
Though anti-Semitism often doesn’t receive the attention or the unanimous condemnation that other forms of racism do, the Anti-Defamation League reported 2,100 incidents of assault, vandalism, violence or harassment against Jewish people in America in 2019. That’s the highest number reported since they started keeping track in 1979.
07/29/2020
Many parents are saying that online school as it is now, is not working. Many are stuck juggling their own work-from-home jobs with their kids’ school needs. While some health and government officials warn that a return to five-day-a-week in-person school in the fall will be too risky, the Secretary of Education is pushing for reopening schools nationwide. It’s a high-stakes Catch-22.
This is the time for good-old-fashioned Christian innovation in education.
07/28/2020
Removing Margaret Sanger’s name from a building in New York only actually means something in a time like ours, of low-stakes, symbolic gestures like erasing a name or disinviting a controversial speaker to a university. It’s the very definition of virtue signaling, a word I hate but which aptly describes what Planned Parenthood is doing here: “canceling” Margaret Sanger while still perpetuating the exact racist population control for which she is being canceled.
07/27/2020
The ideas of Critical Theory, especially since the horrific killing of George Floyd, have become a central part of our national conversation.
07/24/2020
Despite widespread protest over the proposal, Turkey has decided to make Hagia Sophia, formerly the seat of Eastern Christianity, into a mosque.
07/23/2020
The new book titled, Seeing Jesus from the East: A Fresh Look at History’s Most Influential Figure written by Abdu Murray and the late apologist Ravi Zacharias, is unlocking the Eastern backdrop of the Scriptures and Jesus.
07/22/2020
Instead of today's opinion that a quick death would be best, the 15th-century theological work called The Art of Dying asserts that Christians should define a “good death” as one in which people had been reconciled with their loved ones and to the God in whose presence they would soon stand.
07/21/2020
Throughout his book Knowing God, J.I. Packer clarifies that God must be known on His own terms. Too often, the God Christians claim to know is One made in our own image. We must know the God revealed in Scripture and clarified by proper theology.
07/20/2020
If this term of the Supreme Court reveals anything, it’s that it is committed to balancing religious freedom protections with honoring the “right to define one’s own concept of existence,” a concept infamously invented by Justice Anthony Kennedy in 1992. In my opinion, the Court is not succeeding at threading this needle.
07/17/2020
In late March, New Zealand’s parliament voted to “loosen” the nation’s abortion laws, particularly in the latter half of pregnancy when babies become viable outside of the womb.
07/16/2020
As Chuck Colson always said, the only way to truly understand a worldview is follow it to its logical conclusion. The worldview of the sexual revolution is built on three ideas. First, sex, marriage, and babies are separable. Second, men and women are interchangeable. And, third, sexual autonomy is human dignity.
07/15/2020
As headlines share that carbon emissions are down across the globe and animals are thriving in their natural habitats, it appears that some are suggesting that in order to heal, the Earth needs fewer people.
07/14/2020
What is meant by progress? For whom is progress promised? For humanity and human flourishing? As C. S. Lewis warned in his masterful book The Abolition of Man, “The Power of Man to make himself what he pleases means ... the power of some men to make other men what they please.”
“The man-moulders of the new age,” Lewis continued, “will be armed with the powers of the omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please.”
07/13/2020
In Seeing Jesus from the East, Ravi Zacharias and Abdu Murray explain how certain underlying norms of Eastern culture, including the role and purpose of stories and symbols, the power of the “honor and shame” mentality that pervades the East, the meaning and rewards of sacrifice, the role of teachers and prophets within a wisdom-oriented culture, and – my favorite – the use of parables, are all critical to understand if we are to comprehend the full biblical witness about Jesus Christ.
07/10/2020
One-hundred and fifty-three high-profile thinkers recently signed a letter denouncing cancel-culture.
07/09/2020
The Supreme Court ruled this week that religious institutions can uphold their religious beliefs including in regards to providing or refusing to provide birth control and contraception to employees.
07/08/2020
In 1996, Tom Wolfe penned an essay predicting that new technologies would render our traditional ideas about the soul, the mind, the "self" and free will obsolete. Instead, these new technologies have turned out to pose more questions about if it is possible for these things not to exist.
07/06/2020
According to a new report from the U.S. Census Bureau, America has gotten older faster over the last ten years than at any other time in history. Since 2010, Americans over 65 have become the fastest-growing segment of the population. Meanwhile, the number of those under 18 actually shrank between 2010 and 2019.
07/02/2020
A dominant narrative today is that fathers are expendable except for, perhaps, genetic and financial contributions. Either life goes on just fine without them, or they can be easily replaced by a “loving parent.” The stories of Michael Jordan, Dennis Rodman, and Lee Boyd Malvo, however, suggest that there is a dad-shaped hole in all us that only dads can fill.
07/01/2020
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 vote, ruled that a state tax credit which “[discriminates] against religious schools and the families whose children attend or hope to attend them” violates the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause.
06/30/2020
On Monday, the Supreme Court issued a 5-4 decision striking down a Louisiana law that requiring abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.
06/29/2020
A federal judge on Friday, issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting New York's governor and New York City's Mayor from enforcing “gathering limitations” on houses of worship that aren’t also imposed on non-religious entities.
06/26/2020
Though we may not be able to visit our senior neighbors right now, we can still serve them in creative ways.
06/25/2020
It is clear that Christian genocide is what Boko Haram and the Fulani herdsman are after in Nigeria. Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari, however, denies this. In a recently issued statement, he insisted that “false allegations of persecution of Christians” are “a most misleading campaign.” President Buhari, by the way, is the son of a Fulani chief.
06/24/2020
Given the economic turmoil, social unrest, and growing misunderstanding of how economies function, what better time could there be to ensure your kids and grandkids understand the fundamentals of money and stewardship from a Biblical worldview, what money is for, how it can be properly used to bless others and advance the kingdom?
06/23/2020
As voters, it is imperative that we stand up against the genetic modification of human embryos by electing officials who will fight for legislation to regulate the practice.
06/22/2020
Many are wrestling with how the Supreme Court's Obergefell v. Hodges decision will impact religious liberty.
06/19/2020
Rob Kenney did not always have his father around. The newly-minted YouTube celebrity with three grown children of his own, had a father who walked out on him when he was fourteen. Unsure of where to go, Kenney moved in with his older brother, and slowly learned the skills his dad wasn’t there to teach him. Realizing now what all he missed, Kenney started a YouTube channel to teach skills to young people without dads in their life.
06/18/2020
No matter the issue, from public policy to personal morality to global health, people seem to immediately run to their ideological and political corners. No discussion, little charity, less concern about the requirements of a common life together. A lot of yelling. It’s difficult to imagine a people less able to accomplish a life together than us, with no shared vision and no shared memory.
06/16/2020
Yesterday, the Supreme Court determined that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act does indeed prohibit discrimination in employment on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.
06/15/2020
House Majority Whip James Clyburn, a veteran of the Civil Rights movement, worries that calls to defund or abolish the police could “hijack the momentum to make serious police reforms in the wake of George Floyd’s death.” As he put it, “if you mean reimagining policing, say that.”
06/12/2020
Christians are, according to Paul, reconciled in order to become reconcilers. In every age and era of history, there are examples of reconciliation and restoration in the midst of brokenness. Including right now.
06/11/2020
The protesting and rioting and angry social media posting and breathless news reporting run the gamut of helpful to unhelpful, righteous anger to unrighteous opportunism. And yet, we are seeing across the nation and around the world, a fundamental feature of humankind and the world we live in. There is an expectation that such a thing as justice exists, and that it should be done.
06/10/2020
After long denying that they received payment for fetal body parts, Planned Parenthood officials gave sworn depositions that appear to show them admitting to having actually received payment to body parts of aborted babies.
06/09/2020
Blackout Tuesday is the latest example of what’s called “hashtag activism,” or internet advocacy. Now that social media operates within our culture like a public square, it only makes sense that people would take to their keyboards when they want social change.
06/08/2020
Today, too many secondary issues, especially on how best to apply Christian morality and truth to the public square, have been made primary. Now hear me clearly, secondary issues are important, and we should debate them. Those ideas have consequences and victims, too. But we are far too quick to make secondary issues primary and to dismiss those on the other side of us as being evil.
06/05/2020
We expected a steep decline in mental health during this pandemic. Which is exactly what happened.
06/04/2020
Christians should realize that the awe that overwhelms humans when watching man set foot on the moon or a robot land on Mars or astronauts boarding the space station is more than a mere feeling. Rather, it’s a testament to our unique status and role in creation, as well as our drive and capacity to imagine beyond the constraints of what is to what might be, and it’s a reminder that the universe is a place to be known, explored, and even subdued.
06/03/2020
After nights of rioting and violence across America and even right outside the White House, the president punctuated his speech by walking from the Rose Garden to a historically important church that was nearly burned down the night before. He then posed with a Bible in hand beside the church sign.
The Bible should never be used as a prop.
06/02/2020
Christians must not run for political or ideological corners. To the best of our ability, we must affirm all truths, even those hard to swallow, and we must deny all lies, even the ones that are politically expedient.
06/01/2020
This week, Andy Crouch launches the third module of the Truth. Love. Together. virtual event, with a session on “The Kind of People the World Needs.” I cannot imagine anything more timely and relevant!
05/29/2020
A recent study examining the sun is a reminder that God perfectly orchestrated our existence.
05/28/2020
Over these past two months, I’ve concluded that none of the most important issues we face today as a culture were created by this virus. Rather, the virus exposed and accelerated issues that already mattered.
05/27/2020
In the midst of a global pandemic that has killed a few hundred thousand people, unleashed a global recession, and will likely exacerbate food shortages and political instability around the world, one might wonder how introducing gender-neutral language became a United Nations priority.
05/26/2020
It’s no coincidence that Xi Jinping doubled down on his own cult of personality and cracked down on religious freedom just as China’s economy began to slow. The renewed call to Chinese nationalism from Beijing effectively distracted the population from growing economic worries and offered an effective pretext for cracking down on Hong Kong protestors, many of whom see their protesting as an outworking of their Christian faith and as something for which they are willing to die.
05/22/2020
Baylor historian Philip Jenkins predicts that in the people will think about church in terms of “BC…Before Coronavirus,” and after.
The key factor in Jenkin’s fascinating analysis is what we might call “pre-existing conditions.” In other words, in many ways, the coronavirus hasn’t so much created problems for the Church as it has revealed and accelerated them.
05/21/2020
Evolutionary psychology is a field specializing in hypothesis in which natural selection explains all human behaviors. According to this way of thinking, all of our modern behaviors are best understood as carryovers from those ancient behaviors that offered our ancestors evolutionary advantage over others.
05/20/2020
Ravi is a real-life example of what Paul told the men of Athens, that God places us in particular times in history. Ravi emerged at a time when many needed to see that faith could be deep, connected to the existential challenges of life while not only answering the skeptics and cynics, but challenging their assumptions and conclusions.
05/19/2020
The sad fact is that today, starting a conversation with “the Bible says” will often cause the listener to stop listening. So what you do is make arguments based on what the Reformers called common grace, or what historically has been known as natural law. This is what Paul did when he gave his famous sermon at Mars Hill, his first foray into the Greek culture.
05/18/2020
If truth is grounded in the person of Christ, our proper response must be to not only know truth, but love truth.
05/15/2020
Adoption is proof that physically bearing children is not the only way a woman becomes a mother. Among the darkest evils of surrogacy is that it treats a mother as less than a whole person, wanted for her procreational parts that are increasingly treated as consumer products, especially as commercial surrogacy becomes more common.
05/14/2020
Christian missionaries are the ones so often depicted as judgmental and dismissive of native cultures. The history of Christian missions certainly does include bad ideas about native peoples and bad behavior by those tasked with bringing the Good News to them. Still, today, it’s Western liberal secularists leading the way in being judgmental and dismissive of native cultures.
05/13/2020
I’m convinced that the best opening line in history is by C. S. Lewis’s in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader: “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” In selfish, snotty-nosed Eustace, Lewis personified how malforming and narcissistic, in both habit and pedagogy, education can be, especially when it encourages students to “look inside,” “express themselves,” and “be whoever they want to be.”
05/12/2020
The rise of cohabitation has followed not only a shift of attitudes about out-of-wedlock sex, but about the institution of marriage itself. Several years ago, another Pew study found that more than half of young people in America thought marriage was “obsolete.”
05/11/2020
Last week on Twitter Southern Seminary professor Andrew Walker wondered aloud on Twitter, why there has been such a “general mismanagement of religious liberty at the gubernatorial and municipal levels”?
I think, like so many other things I could point to during this time, this is a problem COVID-19 certainly didn’t create.
05/08/2020
We’ve repeatedly pointed out the many ethical problems with surrogacy on BreakPoint: it assumes “children” are a right that God never promised; it assumes a Gnostic view of human bodies and relationships; it denies children the opportunity to be raised by their biological mom and a dad; it treats children as products instead of image-bearers; it poses a significant risk for women to be exploited financially.
05/07/2020
If you are looking for a great Christian show to watch, I would recommend VidAngels' The Chosen.
05/06/2020
Today, the United States and much of the West is in the midst of a natural experiment. The pathogen being researched is not a virus, but the bad ideas of the sexual revolution, ideas that have left many victims and caused great suffering.
05/05/2020
Every Ramadan, but especially one in the midst of a pandemic, is a good time to keep our Muslim neighbors, and Muslims around the world, in prayer. After all, this is the time where many Muslims are seeking to hear from God, and for the last several decades, God has been breaking through to so many Muslims through dreams, in the reading of Holy Scripture, and via other Muslim converts to point them to Christ.
05/04/2020
We should never remove a fence until we know why it was put up in the first place.
There’s no doubt we live in a culture that’s quite committed to clearing away all kinds of moral fences in all areas of culture, often replacing them with new fences in new places. What used to be unthinkable is now unquestionable. What used to be unquestionable is now thought of as quaint, Puritanical, and in some cases, oppressive and evil. What used to belong to families now belongs to the state. The guilty are now victims; the good guys now the bad guys; the essential now non-essential.
05/01/2020
Steve Garber's new book The Seamless Life: A Tapestry of Love & Learning, Worship & Work, presents a diverse and beautiful collage of insights, with its intellectually and theological rich devotional passages, are united by a single idea: Our work, in whatever corner of the world God has placed us, has a sacred quality.