Here are the ten most popular articles from the CrossPolitic Blogazine in 2018. These articles garnered a lot of attention this year and they highlight key aspects of the work at CrossPolitic, especially illustrating the vision for the blogazine. This is also a great way to review the past year.
Here’s the countdown:
- Jason Farley wonders about Black History Month’s Startling Omission of Margaret Sanger. He retraces the eugenics project of Sanger and how she was working to eradicate black people in America. Her project is still continued today by Sanger’s organization Planned Parenthood.
- George Grant encourages Christians to step into the fray and build Christian culture. The call is one of Meaning it, Believing it, and Living It. Looking at Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the tares, Grant writes, “As history draws toward consummation, evil will become ever more consistently evil. The tares will mature. But notice the adamant caveat: “They will not make further progress” (2 Timothy 3:9). Why will they not make further progress? Because just as the tares continue to mature, so does the wheat. The church becomes more and more consistent as history proceeds. She becomes more and more self-consciously Christ-like as covenantal faithfulness is worked out more and more consistently. The truth of the Gospel actually becomes clearer and clearer as time goes on.”
- Rhett Burns picked up the hot debate on gun control asking is there A Christian Case for Gun Rigthts? He reminds readers that “if we think corporately, not just individually, then we see that one consequence of human depravity is oppressive governments. Depravity can be institutionalized in a wicked, authoritarian regime and weaponized against its own citizens.” And this is a key reason to support gun rights.
- Rhett was back with a Music Review of Andrew Peterson’s Resurrection Letters: Epilogue. He writes, “Andrew Peterson translates this type of imagination into joyful, hope-filled folk and roots rock music. His latest EP, Resurrection Letters: Prologue is a Lenten musical devotional, taking listeners to the depths of melancholy in anticipation of the joy of resurrection.”
- Chris Wiley, in a guest post, explained how to be an Antifragile Pastor. He writes, “Most of the people that tell you to “go all in” on pastoral ministry don’t see things this way. But “all-in” is a formula for losing it all…Guys that go all in discover after a few years that they have a wife, a few kids, a mortgage, along with some other bills, and a high-risk job that barely makes ends meet. When these guys discover how fragile they are, they become highly susceptible to suggestion.”
- An anonymous author wrote about his experience with his transconfused niece and how the State Came For Her. “Upon her announcement that she was a boy, state counselors began intensive counseling and gave her a mentor, an 18-year-old who had transitioned from a girl to a boy. Then came meetings with my sister-in-law and mother-in-law: If they don’t call her a boy and use her new name, she will commit suicide and they will lose her. When people have no deeply held convictions and are told they are responsible for the suicide of their daughter, you can imagine how quickly they acquiesce.”
- After a hot CP show in April with the candidates for Lt. Governor in Idaho, Gabe, Toby, and Knox, wrote Abortion, the Death Penalty, and Our Nations Hypocrisy. The show got national attention when the candidates were asked about abortion and the death penalty. Bob Nonini seemed to agree with this idea in the interview and the news media screamed in shock. The CP hosts responded, “As we explained on the live show, the Bible puts such a high premium on the value of life that it clearly teaches that in the ordinary course of things, all things being equal, with due process, and two or three witnesses, premeditated murder deserves the death penalty: life for life. This is the standard of basic Biblical justice.”
- Pr. Toby wrote a piece about Statist Prayers for Parkland USA. Some people thought it insensitive for others to say they were praying for the situation and then not offering “real” solutions to these issues. But Toby responded to this idea saying that if you aren’t turning to the true God for the solution, then you are asking an idol for help. Toby writes, “You are appealing to gods who cannot save. So enough with your hypocritical platitudes. Save your self-righteous posturing for your cocktail parties. Your cries for the government to save us are worthless. Demands for “gun control” are the obsessive-compulsive prayers of Statists. Clinical psychiatrists report that mental patients often gravitate to obsessive behaviors because they seem to offer an illusion of control.”
- George Grant was back with another hot article on the Nouveau Pelagianism of our day: gender and homosexuality. He writes, “Here is the bottom line: the raging debates over gender and sexuality issues in our day all too often miss the essential point. While gender and sexuality are indeed important issues, there is an issue far more important, one that serves as the foundation underlying all these ancillary matters, and that is the issue of the Gospel itself. What we are witnessing is a revival of the ancient battle between Biblical, Augustinian orthodoxy and Unbiblical, Pelagian heterodoxy.”
- Our most popular post in 2018 was about Pr. Tim Keller and his article in the New Yorker Can Evangelicalism Survive Donald Trump and Roy Moore? Toby responded showing that Keller has a Baal Problem: “What Keller has done is essentially, if somewhat ambiguously, admitted that those are “political issues” that are not as important as our “theological issues.” Whatever Keller meant by the claim, he has communicated that the murder of babies, sodomy, pornography, trans-perversions are “political issues” that are not as important as our theological beliefs. Now I grant that Keller could squirm and still insist that abortion and sodomy are moral issues and that he isn’t backing away from biblical positions on those topics at all, and I would fully assume that’s what he’d say to me or anyone else privately, but when you speak into the microphone in the midst of a culture war, you cannot mumble like this.”
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