Mob Justice in SEC Country: Tennessee Football and the Alabama Senate Race
After another dismal football season, the University of Tennessee has now fumbled its coaching search. Last week, the Volunteers had reached an agreement to hire Ohio State defensive coordinator Greg Schiano as its head football coach. However, the deal was dropped because of allegations that he knew about a sexual predator and did nothing—allegations which […]
Worldviewishness
“The most practical and important thing about a man is his view of the universe. The question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether, in the long run, anything else affects them.” G.K. Chesterton “Worldview is the most important thing that we can know about a man. Ideas have consequences. […]
Our Souls are Starved: The Rise of Astrology and Witchcraft
So…witches are on the rise. Sadly, this is not the beginning of a stand-up comedy routine, but a religious trend in the United States. According to this report, millennials are trading traditional religion for witchcraft and astrology. A majority of young adults consider astrology to be scientific, while the psychic services industry has grown two-percent […]
Arise, O Lord, in Your Anger: Praying Biblically after Sutherland Springs
Twenty-six of our brothers and sisters in Christ were gunned down a week ago during Sunday morning worship in Sutherland Springs, Texas. The victims ranged from unborn baby to seventy-seven-year-old, including eight people from one family. Devin Kelley, dishonorably discharged from the Air Force, walked into the church and emptied fifteen magazines from his AR-15 […]
Shall the Critical Race Theorists Win?
Racial reconciliation is all the rage these days, and rightly so. It is hard to deny the animosity and division that plague our nation and that race-based attitudes are often involved of such hostilities. Further, Galatians 3:28 and Colossians 3:11 are still in our Bibles, and believers are called to unity with their brothers and […]
Psalms With a Southern Accent – My Soul Among Lions
In my first church job the Pastor gave me a bit of advice that stuck. Children learn most of their theology from the songs that their church sings. They may not remember your sermons, but they will carry the songs they sing in church the rest of their lives. This is not just true of […]
Are Cannabis Laws Paternalistic?
For several years Peter Hitchens has made a sustained argument against the legalization of cannabis. One feature of his argument is to point out the correlation between cannabis use, mental illness, and violent crime. He links mental illness with both legal and illegal mind-altering drugs, such as cannabis, and then goes on to show that […]
Gun Laws and Heroism after Las Vegas
Like a sniper in a war zone, Stephen Paddock found a defensible position 400 yards from his target, and set to waging his little war on the Route 91 Harvest music fest in the early morning hours of October 1. From the killing fields of the darkened concert ground it was impossible to see or […]
Idol Matching 3
Recap In this series, we’ve been dealing with some of the idols in the world that need to be torn down and the fact that Christians keep their own version of these idols in their hearts. Same-sex mirage out there is akin in some ways to fornication and sexual looseness or an unbiblical desire for […]
No Floor to Stand On: Hollywood Faces Sexual Assault Scandal
Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein was outed as a sexual predator last week in a New York Times story. Or, more accurately, he was outed nationally and with corroborating evidence. His predations on young women have long been the rumor of the film industry. Thus far twenty-seven women have made public accusations against Weinstein, including Oscar […]
No Exceptions: Pro-Life Mom Refuses Chemo to Save Unborn Baby
Carrie DeKlyen, a Michigan mother of five, started getting headaches last March. After the pains worsened she saw a doctor, and scans showed a brain tumor. According to the Chicago Tribune, the pathology report revealed something more cruel: glioblastoma, a rare and aggressive brain cancer. She would have the tumor removed in April, but the […]
Kill You to Call – Nicki Bluhm and The Blues as Connection
The Blues are sad songs. No one wants that. And yet The Blues persist. There is little reason to believe that The Blues is going away. Even when the current pop music is thumping and protesteth its cheerfulness too much, The Blues continue to hold a steady fanbase. I was sitting in one of my […]
Most People Don’t Look
Most of the people who walked by us looked indifferent; they probably didn’t even notice our signs. But of those who actually looked at us, most of them smiled or gave thumbs up. Many stopped by and said thank you for volunteering. One woman stopped by to talk about the hypocrisy of our culture. (Recently […]
Idol Matching 2
Round Two Same-sex mirage and divorce. Same-sex mirage and fornication. In a previous post, I argued that far too often, the idolatry we enshrine in our own hearts matches the idolatry present in same-sex mirage. As Christians, when we countenance any sort of abuse of God’s gifts of sexual intimacy and marriage, namely divorce and […]
Rob Bell’s “What Is the Bible?” Part 4
Given what Bell has said so far about the Bible, a brief excursus about the doctrine of Scripture would be helpful. As I have pointed out, one of Bell’s problems is that he will simply not accept some things that the Bible says, especially what the Bible says about itself. Several salient points should be […]
Making Welfare Less Important
We must move toward serious welfare reform not by simply pressuring people to work, but rather by supporting the pursuit of higher-wage employment. The ultimate goal would be to get rid of welfare entirely, or at least reduce it to being a last safety net for those without any other assistance available. If we emphasize […]
States’ Rights and the Union: An Ongoing Debate
When we think about states’ rights, our minds often go straight to the Civil War. Few of us recognize that the debate is actually still quite alive. Events like those in Charlottesville draw our minds back to unresolved animosity of the War Between the States, but we should be using these events to help us […]
Easily Steered: Support for Same-Sex Marriage at Record High
The LGBT war machine rolls on. According to the latest polling data from the Pew Research Center, natiohttp://www.people-press.org/2017/06/26/support-for-same-sex-marriage-grows-even-among-groups-that-had-been-skeptical/nal support for so called same-sex marriage is at a record high, with nearly two-thirds of Americans saying they favor allowing same-sex couples to marry. [1] Even groups traditionally opposed to same-sex marriage such as baby boomers, blacks, […]
It’s Edited: Don’t be Duped by the Newsertainment
Editing is an art form. My son Cedric was coming in the front door a few days ago when his sister asked, “Did you eat an ice cream sandwich?” He replied, “Malachi had two.” That was, strictly speaking, true. Malachi had eaten two ice cream sandwiches. The difficulty is that Cedric had also eaten one. […]
Fading Back to Black and White
After the Charlottesville riots, America was thrown into a fit of iconoclasticism. Tearing down statues of Confederate leaders, demanding the renaming of streets named after “white supremacists.” When did American history become so binary? I always thought that there were more groups than just white supremacists and good people. It’s ironic that, just as our […]