Worth Reading - 4/13

Here are some links worth following this week.

1. Trevin Wax discusses the importance of pursuing Christ-likeness in all our decisions.

“If consumerist eschatology tells the story of the self-made individual moving from a place of financial poverty to wealth and status and success, then the church must tell the story of an individual moving from spiritual death to new life in Christ, from immaturity in Christ to representing him well before the world. Growth in holiness, from one’s conversion until one’s death or Christ’s return, must become the dominant narrative by which Christians live.

The goal of discipleship is Christlikeness; therefore, we cannot judge our growth or success by the world’s standards but rather by God’s. The question can never be, “Are we keeping up with the Joneses?,” but, “Are we looking more like Jesus?””

2. Whatever you might think about the climate change and the environment, there should be little question that we need to clean up the amount of trash we are pushing into oceans. This article about a whale with 64lbs of trash in its belly is an indication of a problem.

“Plastic bags. Rope. Pieces of nets. A drum. These items were among 64 pounds of trash found in the digestive tract of a juvenile sperm whale that recently washed ashore in southern Spain.

As Lorraine Chow reports for EcoWatch, the unfortunate whale was found dead on a beach in Spain’s Murcia region in February. When researchers at the El Valle Wildlife Recovery Center carried out a necropsy, they found that the whale’s stomach and intestines were filled with garbage, much of it plastic. According to Andrea Diaz of CNN, researchers think that the whale died of peritonitis, an infection of the abdomen; the marine mammal was unable to digest and expel the plastic waste it had consumed, leading to a lethal rupture in its digestive system.”

3. Alan Jacobs reflects on the way that adults are conditioning children to  "lead our culture" and it isn't entirely a good thing.

“No child came up with the phrase “I identify as gender nonbinary.” It is a faithful echo of an adult’s words.

Now, maybe you think it’s great that these children can begin to transition from one sex to another at an early age. I don’t, but I’m not going to argue that point now. My point is simply that if you say “It’s the children who are now leading us,” you’re lying — perhaps not consciously or intentionally, but it’s lying all the same because the truth is so easy to discern if you wish to do so. (As Yeats wrote, “The rhetorician would deceive his neighbors, / The sentimentalist himself.”)

This is why I think one of the most important books you could possibly read right now, if you care about these matters, is Richard Beck’s We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s. Beck is anything but a conservative — he’s an editor for n+1 — and his book is highly critical of traditionalist beliefs about families. And a “moral panic” might seem to be the opposite of the celebration of new openness to gender expressions and sexualities. But if you read Beck’s book you will see precisely the same cultural logic at work as we see in today’s children’s crusades.”

4. Wendy Alsup asks whether Numbers 5 is bad for women:

“Simply put, God is good. He does what is good. So His statutes are then worth engaging when we are unsure, because we trust His character.

Consider the context. Remember that civilization isn’t very civilized at this point in humanity. In the context of the ancient world, including outside the bounds of Israel, a husband was understood to have full authority over his wife and, if accused of adultery, would have been well within his cultural rights to divorce her without cause and in some cases even put her to death. For instance, in the Code of Hammurabi, an accused wife was expected to “jump into the river for her husband” if he similarly accused her of unfaithfulness, even in the absence of evidence.

Not so for God’s people. In God’s household, if a husband accused a wife without evidence, God commanded that the priest be called in to mediate. Do you start to hear whispers of the good news of Jesus?

The accuser with all the cultural power could not decide the consequences for himself. He had to submit to another who stood in protection of his wife and determined her guilt or innocence by process before God, not by simple suspicion or accusation.”

5. David Platt gave a profound sermon at T4G on racism and the gospel and the need for repentance. It's worth your time.

Worth Reading - 4/6

1. Utah has made provision that ensures "free range" parenting will remain legal. This post by Joe Carter reminds us that free range parenting is the way things used to be.

“My parents should have been jailed for child neglect.

At least that’s what would be their fate if I were growing up today. Fortunately for them (and for me), I was a child during the 1970s, a time when kids were (mostly) free to explore the world.

At age seven I was allowed to wander a mile in each direction from my home. By age nine I was exploring the underground sewers and drainage system of Wichita Falls, Texas. When I was a 12 I was given a .22 semi-automatic rifle and allowed to roam the woods all day. I had almost total freedom as long as I agreed to one condition: I had to take my younger brother along with me.

We didn’t have cellphones to serve as electronic leashes; we merely had the setting sun as a guide to when we had to be home. Until dusk, our parents rarely knew where on the planet we were.”

2. An article about kids from impoverished backgrounds finding their way through top level universities and struggling to find their identity in light of the privilege around them

“As these brilliant children of housecleaners and bus drivers move through the higher-education system, they are struggling to reconcile what it means to go from being poor to being privileged: Low-income students who are the first generation in their families to go to college now represent about 15 percent of top college enrollments. Many feel an acute pressure to succeed. Many are conflicted about whether to go for a platinum paycheck or save the world. More broadly, many are struggling to navigate one of the most difficult transitions in a modern, developed society – moving from one socioeconomic class to another.

As Brown puts it with simple mathematical precision, “I am trying to work through what it means to be who I am.”

The most exalted schools in higher education don’t come with warning labels: This will change your life. Your relationship with your family. Even how you identify yourself. For generations of privileged students who filled these campuses, after all, the environment was familiar. It was what was “normal,” comfortable.”

3. This post in the Chicago Tribune reminds us that poverty has changed a lot for the better thanks to capitalism. Also, the narrative that poor people go liberal is a myth.

“Last week, in her State of the Union response, Joni Ernst mentioned going to school with bread bags on her feet to protect her shoes. These sorts of remembrances of poor but honest childhoods used to be a staple among politicians — that’s why you’ve heard so much about Abe Lincoln’s beginnings in a log cabin. But the bread bags triggered a lot of hilarity on Twitter, which in turn triggered this powerful meditation from Peggy Noonan on how rich we have become — so rich that we have forgotten things that are well within living memory.

I am a few years younger than Noonan, but I grew up in a very different world — one where a number of my grammar school classmates were living in public housing or on food stamps, but everyone had more than one pair of shoes. In rural areas, like the one where Jodi Ernst grew up, this lingered longer. But all along, Americans got richer and things got cheaper — especially when global markets opened up. Payless will sell you a pair of child’s shoes for $15, which is two hours of work even at minimum wage.”

4. A thoughtful post from Tim Challies asking what constitutes a "gospel issue."

“I believe Carson summarizes the matter well: “To affirm something is or is not a gospel issue is not a transparent expression. It is likely to be clearest among those who share a common confession as to what the gospel is. It is useful only when it means something more stringent than that X can be tied in some way to the gospel: one must show that without this X the gospel itself is seriously threatened.” This is key: “It is always wise to recognize that some topics are hugely important on grounds other than gospel issues and that our choice of topics is generated in part by our perception of the threats and errors of our own age.” In other words, it’s not necessary to demand a doctrine is acknowledged as a gospel issue in order to affirm its importance.

Speaking personally, I have probably used the phrase “X is a gospel issue” from time to time, but have been trying not to. I want to find more helpful, more accurate, and more time-tested ways to distinguish between issues that are absolutely central to a right understanding of the Christian faith and those that, though still important, are peripheral. I especially want to ensure I’m not labeling my pet doctrine a gospel issue simply as a means to prevail in arguments. After all, if everything’s a gospel issue, I guess nothing’s a gospel issue.”

5. Recently, the ERLC and TGC combined forces to host a celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s life, 50 years after his death. This interview by Russell Moore of John Perkins is worth your time.

Worth Reading - 3/30

1. Christians often celebrate the goodness of conversion, but de-conversion is becoming another prominent theme where previously professed Christians disavow their earlier faith. This article at Reformation 21 continues an earlier discussion on the theme.

“Apostasy often begins by avoiding worship, including the preaching and teaching of the Word. Hebrews’ unknown writer warns his audience against, “neglecting to meet together ...” ‘Neglect’ is too weak; it should read, “To utterly forsake...” Christ’s Church. It’s not sleeping in a couple snowy Sundays a year!

People fall for various reasons. Some find the teaching too strong, too hard, or too mainline Biblical for their taste. Whatever their reasons, they wish their minister would dish up a different spiritual diet. Jesus had followers who found His teaching too ‘hard’, so they “no longer walked with him.” (Isaiah 30:9-11, John 6:60-66)

Or perhaps being seen with ‘those eccentric Christians’ was embarrassing, compared to those in their office or social circles. Or perhaps they rebelled against Biblical morality.

Again, maybe they mouthed the words too long. One day, they ask themselves, “Do I really believe this?” Or they succumb to American individualism, thinking of it as “finding my own space.” So they ease up when they should go deeper.

For whatever reason, apostates abandon the churches they once knew and loved. Some adopt a distorted ‘Christianity’, crafted to suit themselves. They attend ‘alternative Bible studies’. They often say, “Well, that’s what you believe, but I like to think of God as....” They think Almighty God is amenable to their definition of Him.”

2. I generally don't engage in the gun control debate, because it is fruitlessly circular. This article from the left-leaning New York Magazine argues for gun control, but points out that there is not an epidemic of school shootings and it is unwise, dishonest, and unhelpful to argue there is one.

“By keeping the national spotlight on the mass murder at their high school — and calling on their peers across the country to walk out of their schools, so as to “no longer risk their lives waiting for someone else to take action to stop the epidemic of mass school shootings” in the United States — the theater kids of Marjory Stoneman Douglas have built the broadest public consensus for gun-safety measures that America has seen in a quarter-century.

But they’ve also (inadvertently) triggered a moral panic about the safety of America’s schools that has little basis in empirical reality — and which is already lending momentum to policies that would increase juvenile incarceration, waste precious educational resources on security theater, and bring more guns into our nation’s classrooms.

On Tuesday in Tallahassee, Republicans in Florida’s state legislature advanced a law that aims to put one police officer — and ten gun-wielding teachers — into every public school in the state. The $67 million “school marshal” program would provide teachers who volunteer to be emergency gunslingers with a $500 stipend, a background check, drug test, psychological exam, and 132 hours of training. In total, the bill’s school safety measures come at a price tag of $400 million. One piece of that package — an increase in funding for mental health counselors — is laudable. The rest are either unnecessary or actively dangerous. The average salary for a teacher in Florida is nearly $10,000 less than the national mean; its public school system consistently ranks among the bottom half of U.S. states. This is not a place that can afford to misallocate hundreds of millions of dollars in educational funds.”

3. Some proponents of increasing the size of the welfare programs in the US argue that absolute, abject, or extreme poverty is a major problem in the US, with millions in that state. This article from National Review argues that the statistics used by some advocates of redistribution ignore the existing benefits from welfare programs, which significantly reduces the reality of poverty in the US.

“The omission and undercounting of welfare aid is particularly troubling. For example, in 2016, federal, state, and local governments spent $223 billion on cash, food, and housing benefits for low-income families with children, an amount three times that needed to eliminate all official poverty and ten times that needed to wipe out deep poverty among them. But the Census Bureau’s income surveys counted only $7.6 billion of this spending for purposes of assessing poverty or deep poverty.

A more accurate picture of the economic resources of low-income households can be obtained from the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX), collected by the U.S. Census Bureau and published by the U.S. Department of Labor. This survey contains detailed, self-reported household expenditures for each month and indirectly captures much of the income and many of the benefits missing in income surveys. The CEX routinely shows that low-income households spend $2.40 for every $1 of income that the Census Bureau claims they have.

Our analysis of the CEX shows that the number of Americans living on less than $4 per day is effectively zero. Since 1980, the CEX has reported on the annual consumption expenditures of 222,170 households. Of these 222,170 cases, 175 reported spending less than $4 per person per day. That’s one household in 1,270.”

4. Recently Planned Parenthood (which is apparently not all about abortion, except when it is all about abortion) Tweeted they wanted a Disney princess who had had an abortion. Anne Kennedy takes on that macabre idea with wit and grace.

“Reality does have a habit, though, of bashing its way in. The truth for most girls in no way resembles the cartoon. There is no prince charming. There are no pinks and purples. You have to grow up, and if you can avoid being groped by the rich, the famous, the politician, the sex trafficker, you can probably get a desk job somewhere and work and work and work. Maybe you do have a run in with planned parenthood at some point. But you don’t mince breezily in with little twittering birds lighting your way. You drag your feet. Sometimes your boyfriend drags you, or your mother. And when you come out you’re not dancing, you’re limping. I know because I stood by and watched and prayed sometime ago. The rich and famous who vaunt their abortions are not like the young women facing a gray hopeless life, caught in systemic poverty and family dysfunction that never seems to have a door that opens out. Planned Parentood promised to be the door, but turned out they didn’t even have a lock into which to put a key, and they have no key.”

5. I've appreciated Andrew Peterson's music greatly over the past few years. Trevin Wax just published an annotated guide to the music of Andrew Peterson.

“No contemporary songwriter has had a greater effect on my life than Andrew Peterson. His first album appeared the year I moved to Romania as a missionary student, and since that time, his songs have become part of the soundtrack for my life and faith.

Andrew’s work resonates with me for several reasons.

First, Andrew expresses a childlike wonder toward this world and our place in it, waking us up and seizing our imaginations until we see—truly see—the wonders of existence. I gravitate toward music and books that lead me in the way of wonder.
Second, Andrew’s albums are steeped in biblical allusions and Scriptural imagery—all of which grow more powerful the more you study Scripture and the more you put his songs on “repeat.” There’s a richness to his lyrics that rewards the contemplative listener.
Third, Andrew’s songs bear the mark of authenticity, giving voice to a faith that is firm in its grasp of the truth and yet honest in its experience of doubt or suffering. The result is a compelling portrait of Christianity in all of its messy glory.”

Resurrection Letters, Vol. 1 [2 CD][Deluxe Edition]

By Andrew Peterson

Buy on Amazon

Worth Reading - 3/23

1. How one woman's "aha moment" led to a ministry in her community with a potential for international and eternal impact:

“Many of those families came to the United States from nations torn by war, persecution or famine. They represent only a small fraction of more than 150,000 refugees in North Carolina’s Triangle region from Somalia, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and other countries.

Unzicker saw the swelling crowd of migrants as an opportunity.

”Oh my gosh,” she thought, “we could share the gospel right now.”

Unzicker called the group together and began to tell them about the Good News from a chapter in The Jesus Storybook Bible.

Unzicker’s aha moment—the sudden realization she could tell her foreign-born friends about Jesus on an average summer afternoon—was a turning point for her and the birth of a multiplying ministry.”

2. One of the central attributes of much of modernism and among many moderns is the absence of joy. This post at the Front Porch Republic discusses this unfortunate reality:

“The modern age, in almost every detail, began with the flat rejection of joy. And the modern condition consists in alternately lamenting that there is nothing in which to take joy and in finding simulacra of the feeling of joy to distract us from our general joylessness.

The length of the list of joys refused should stun us. The Protestant Reformers looked upon the world and saw it as a ruin, the cosmos lapsing ever further into decay as if to ensure it would play no role in our redemption by Christ. Martin Luther’s proclamation that one should “Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong (sin boldly), but let your trust in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin, death, and the world” has been put to misleading purposes, over the centuries, by Catholic apologists such as Henrich Denifle and Jacques Maritain, and yet Luther’s words themselves figure decay and loss. Like the world at large, the soul of the Christian has nothing properly good to itself that should cause us wonder. To the contrary, it has sin, but this sin is “covered” by Christ Jesus. Sin remains, but is covered over; it is overcome but not extinguished. We can “rejoice” but the field of joy is in Christ’s strength alone and that strength does not extend to, but dominates, what stands outside of it.

In the wake of the English Civil War, the Puritanical regime of the Commonwealth closed the theaters, stripped the altars, silenced Sundays, and forbade Christmas. Christians had never denied that mirth and laughter had moral significance, but now only the straight sober lips of austerity could be approved.”

3. Bizarrely, positive feelings toward communism are on the rise as evidenced by Colin Kaepernick's efforts to protest police brutality while wearing the image of someone famous for police brutality on his chest. Greg Forster's article at the Gospel Coalition is worth your time as we seek to explain to our neighbors that communism is inimical to Christianity as well as human flourishing of any sort:

“Communism is, at heart, the belief that human ingenuity by itself—without God—can destroy the world’s political and economic evils, if only we’re willing to make the necessary sacrifices. Marx’s complex theories of surplus value, economic determinism, and dialectical history don’t establish that human ingenuity by itself can fix our problems; they presuppose it. They’re built on the assumption that natural reason, without revelation, is capable of understanding human life in a comprehensive way. This involves the assumption that there is no supernatural element in human life.

Communism isn’t a political and economic theory that happens to be associated with atheism. It is atheism—atheism as applied to political and economic systems.

Like fascism, communism is an eschatological theodicy built on, and therefore an idolatrous worship of, political movements. Communism is essentially fascism for rationalists.

If you doubt it, consider that communism was able to thrive, even to the point of almost conquering the world, long after Marx’s theories had been debunked even among communists.

The real dream of communism wasn’t that Marx had fully and finally decoded history, although Marx was foolish enough to think he had. The real dream of communism was that history can be fully and finally decoded. So what if Marx was wrong when he thought he had finished the job? The point is to keep sacrificing everything—conscience, humanity, millions of lives—to ensure we continue working on it. After all, it’s our only hope, because there is no God.”

4. An engaging article at First Things by Patrick Deneen describing how the new aristocracy is asserting their superiority while claiming to pursue equality:

“The new aristocrats believe we have transcended the need for Christianity, which they regard as a myth no less mendacious than Plato’s noble lie. They believe that by dispelling the old myths, they can become the vanguard of an ever more equal society. They blind themselves to the fact that this claim is a form of status maintenance, allowing denial of a deeper commonality with those they regard as benighted and backward. Elites denounce the “populists” while denying that they have fomented a class war. They deplore the obnoxiousness of Donald Trump, perfectly obtuse of their complicity in his ascent.

We are in uncharted territory. Liberalism coexisted with Christianity for its entire history, with Christianity moderating the harder edges of the regnant political philosophy, supporting forms and practices that demanded from elites the recognition of their elevated status, and hence, corresponding responsibilities and duties to those less fortunate. The thoroughgoing disdain and dismissiveness of today’s elites toward the working class is a reflection of our newfound “enlightenment,” just as is the belief among the lower class that only a strong and equally disdainful leader can constrain the elites. Liberalism has achieved its goal of emptying the public square of the old gods, leaving it a harsh space of contestation among unequals who no longer see any commonality. Whether that square can be filled again with newly rendered stories of old telling us of a common origin and destination, or whether it must simply be dominated by whoever proves the strongest, is the test of our age. ”

5. Derek Rishmawy writes about justice in the book of Ezekiel, countering some of the arguments against retributive justice being possible for a holy God.

“ It’s worth examining a few elements of the judgment of God upon Israel.

First, God’s judgment is “according to your conduct” and is a repayment “for all your detestable practices.” These phrases are repeated in the passage to be underlined. This characteristic is also present in most of the other passages. In that sense, it is retributive, and in kind. This fits with the principle of retribution articulated throughout Torah. There is no hint of arbitrariness, sinful vindictiveness, or overkill. God will, at worst, only bring “down on their own heads all they have done.”

Second, especially in the first passage, you can note that despite God declaring “I will have no pity” and “I will not spare you”, these are acts of judgment long in the works. Now, finally, after much waiting, much excuse-making, much leniency, “the time has come to act.” God has been patient. At one point, he was looking for someone to stand in the gap, to build a wall, but when no one was found, he said “enough is enough.” The rhetoric of fury should not deceive us here or mislead us into picturing God has prone to anger, or liable to fly off the hook.

Third, there is a very clear conceptual and linguistic collocation of the judgment and punishment of God with the wrath and anger of God. For God to punish and judge sin is for him to execute, expend, and pour out his wrath and anger. They are two sides of the same coin, speaking of the same reality in a different idiom. Or rather, they are dimensions of the same reality. God’s wrath is a way of speaking of the retributive dimension of God’s justice in an affective register, as a matter of his will, inclination, and action connected to his moral character.”

Worth Reading - 3/9

1. The internet is a dangerous place, especially for those who are still being formed socially. This post on Medium talks about one platform in particular, but reflects on some of the deep darkness of social media for kids.

“Musical.ly looks innocent — just kids making music videos, and it is that, but more so it’s this: user uploaded content by millions of people who can also live stream, which is how I first encountered porn on Musical.ly. A very helpful naked man live-streamed his live stream (if you know what I mean).

Kids are going to see it eventually, right? Might as well let them see it now. Might as well get them drunk while we’re at it. And high. Can’t keep them bubble-wrapped forever. Eight-year-olds have been diaper-free for five years; if you can pee in a potty, you can hold your own online. Amiright?

Friends who worry I’m over-reacting suggest I make the account private to keep pedophiles at bay, but pedophiles are not my main concern. Here’s why: Pretend you can turn your kid invisible. Pretend you drop your invisible kid off at a warehouse in downtown LA. You have no idea who’s inside — fingers crossed it’s packed with Nobel Peace Prize winners, board certified pediatricians, and J.K. Rowling. Pray it is not packed with the worst of humanity. No one can see your kid, but your kid can see everyone and hear everything.

Would you do it?”

2. This is a long read from the Huffington Post (I know), but it is an interesting story about a couple who made millions of dollars playing a form of lottery with positive odds.

“So perhaps it was only fitting that at age 64, Jerry found himself contemplating that most alluring of puzzles: the lottery. He was recently retired by then, living with Marge in a tiny town called Evart and wondering what to do with his time. After stopping in one morning at a convenience store he knew well, he picked up a brochure for a brand-new state lottery game. Studying the flyer later at his kitchen table, Jerry saw that it listed the odds of winning certain amounts of money by picking certain combinations of numbers.

That’s when it hit him. Right there, in the numbers on the page, he noticed a flaw—a strange and surprising pattern, like the cereal-box code, written into the fundamental machinery of the game. A loophole that would eventually make Jerry and Marge millionaires, spark an investigation by a Boston Globe Spotlight reporter, unleash a statewide political scandal and expose more than a few hypocrisies at the heart of America’s favorite form of legalized gambling.”

3. Walter Strickland talks about his discovery of an excellent and interesting African American theologian.

“Boothe was born on June 13, 1845, in Mobile County, Alabama, as the legal property of Nathaniel Howard. At the age of 3, Boothe learned the alphabet from lettering on a tin plate. At 14, he was sold to attorney James S. Terrel, and he began working as an office boy at a law firm in Clark County, Mississippi.

Mid-19th-century legal practice was rooted in biblical logic, which required young Boothe to explore Scripture on a regular basis. Over time, his exposure to Scripture drew him to salvation. In 1860 he testified that he “reached an experience of grace which so strengthened me as to fix me on the side of God’s people.”

At the conclusion of the Civil War, Boothe’s passion was racial uplift in a society that denied blacks’ humanity before God and the Constitution. At the age of 22, Boothe began teaching for the Freedmen’s Bureau and lecturing regularly at Booker T. Washington’s famed Tuskegee Institute. In the early 1870s, Boothe was a preliminary member of the Colored Baptist Missionary Convention that founded Selma University. He later served as the university’s second president (1901–02). Boothe desired to promote literacy so former slaves could read the Bible for themselves and escape the oppressive interpretative practices that had made the Christian faith a tool of black subservience.”

4. Matthew Arbo engages the topic of assisted suicide at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission's blog.

“The Christian moral tradition, by contrast, has stressed the importance of “bodily integrity.” Human beings should in principle live whole, productive, and loving lives. That was Augustine’s emphasis, for example. Each of us has a duty to self-love and to love others (‘love your neighbor as yourself’). Love of self is natural and can be ordered or disordered. Only love of God leads to a properly ordered love of self and others. On this Christian theological basis, suicide is impermissible because it denies the fact that our lives belong to God and therefore are not ours to take. God alone brings final integrity.

Without love of God, self-love remains disordered. If the congregant’s father does not profess belief, then of course he will not understand his life as belonging to God. The theological rationale will not have strong purchase for him. The question then becomes whether there exists some common or universal rationale opposing euthanasia, a question that brings us to the social reasons why euthanasia is morally impermissible.”

5. Read about a woman whose extreme generosity helped found one of Spurgeon's orphanages.

“Born as Anne Field in Warwickshire, she waited until she was 38 to marry. Her husband, Reverend John William Hillyard, was the Curate of an Anglican Church at Ingestre in Staffordshire. He died just one year after their 1841 marriage.

It has long been a widely held misconception that the money Anne donated to the orphanage came from her husband’s estate. She had, however, inherited funds from her uncle prior to marrying, and was a self-sufficient woman in her own right. Though not rich, Anne was moderately wealthy—a wealth she happily gave to ease the burden of marginalized children.

It was some years after her husband’s death before she acted, but I think we can assume that Anne had considered for some time what to do with her money. Through a series of providential events, she found an answer to her prayers in Charles Spurgeon.”

Worth Reading - 3/2

1. Trevin Wax thoughtfully considers the reality that in our society, there is no such thing as common sense because of the extreme polarization of political opinions.

“My point is not that common sense is an infallible guide to justice and freedom. For some cultures, it was common sense that a widow would throw herself onto the funeral pyre of her husband. In the South, it was common sense among white people that the races were better off segregated. Common sense can be wrong.

My point is that in our society’s most contentious debates, we have a hard time finding “common ground” because there is no “common sense” regarding what’s at stake. The challenge we face is the disappearance of common sense at the level of ideals.

Our problem is not that we disagree over how to achieve the “common good”; it’s that we no longer share a vision of what the common good is or should be.

It’s one thing to debate the best way to achieve a goal. It’s another thing to debate the goal.

It’s one thing to debate the best path forward for making progress. It’s another thing to debate the destination toward which we hope to make progress in the first place.

This is the kind of common sense we lack today. And that’s what makes our dialogue and debate increasingly difficult.”

2. Gene Veith summarizes some research that indicates that worldview, specifically denominational tradition, influences views of the poor. The study he summarizes mischaracterizes Reformed thought, but the concept and research is interesting. It also, I think, goes a bit easy on Veith's preferred tradition, which is why he likes the study.

“For Lutherans, the poor are sinful, but so are the rich and middle class; and they have all been redeemed by the blood of Christ. The Lutherans approached the poor in terms of vocation.

All vocations are equal before God and so are all worthy of respect. God gives daily bread to all by means of the poor peasant hard at work in the fields, who can thus live out his faith by loving and serving his neighbors. But begging is anathema! And those who are poor because they have no work must find a vocation!

Thus, in Lutheran-influenced nations–especially the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland, and also Germany (though Kahl says the German approach is also influenced by its large Catholic population)–the emphasis is on ensuring that the poor work.”

3. Proponents of bringing greater socialism to the US tend to point to Scandinavian countries for their support, but this article from FEE argues that aside from their ginormous welfare state, the Scandinavian countries have a pretty free market.

“So we should be grateful that we only have a medium-sized welfare state. Because our better score on fiscal policy helps to offset our comparatively anemic scores on the other four variables.

Having pointed out that the United States now has only a rather small advantage over Scandinavian nations when looking at all five measures of economic liberty, that’s still better than nothing.

It probably explains, for instance, why Americans of Scandinavian descent earn so much more than their cousins who remained back home.

And why Americans of all backgrounds generally enjoy higher living standards than folks in Europe, even the ones in Nordic nations.”

4. William F. Buckley is, perhaps, responsible for building the conservative movement in the U.S. He died a decade ago. This article summarizes his importance.

“Imagine a world without Mr. Buckley’s presence for all those decades, and his continuing legacy. Not only no National Review, still America’s pre-eminent journal of sensible thought and analysis, but no institutions of the right, ranging from the Young America’s Foundation to The Philadelphia Society. None of the thousands of next-generation followers who have made their individual marks in myriad ways to promote freedom worldwide.

Ever the defender of what Russell Kirk called “the permanent things,” Mr. Buckley continually reminded us that real conservatism is based on tradition and the cumulative wisdom of those on whose shoulders we stand.

He was reluctant to provide a final definition of conservatism, but he offered himself as a definition, admitting he was dependent on human freedom, not as an end, but as a means — to “live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth.”

What a legacy William F. Buckley has left for us to celebrate — and emulate.”

5. P.E. Gobry argues that the reason many on the left don't understand ISIS is because they don't see that humans are not animals. That is, we are not merely consumers and reproducers, but individuals with beliefs and desires that shape our actions.

“But, of course, the problem is deeper than political correctness. For progressives, it’s something I’ve come to call Vulgar Marxism.

While most progressives today disavow actual communism, those that care about the history of ideas still typically regard Karl Marx as an important and serious thinker. And his idea that has had the most influence is dialectical materialism, or the idea that the only driver of history is socioeconomic forces.

According to this view, religions, philosophies, ideologies, worldviews, and even culture at large are simply illusions, embraced after the fact to justify this or that move in our class warfare. Marx’s views of history were influenced by 19th-century evolutionism. Think of the idea that we’re just genes trying to reproduce: You may think that you’re in love, or that you do your work for some higher purpose, but really it’s just your genes tricking you into thinking that to increase their odds of spreading. Hence, for example, his notion that religion is just “the opium of the people” (a quote that is much kinder to religious believers in its context than is usually thought, by the way): beliefs have no influence on history.

This is why progressives view redistribution as almost a holy duty: If everything is about dollars and cents, well, everything is about dollars and cents. Conservatives also believe everyone should have a good standard of living, but they also believe that if people achieve this through work they will attain a greater degree of human flourishing than if they just get a check in the mail, since people’s flourishing is not just limited to the material. That’s why we have more nuanced views about redistribution.”

Worth Reading - 2/23

1. I've recently been reading Hannah Arendt's book about the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, so this post at The Gospel Coalition about two young people that resisted the oppressive government of the Third Reich was encouraging:

“Formerly enthusiastic about the Third Reich, the siblings soon realized the brutality and oppression of their own government. By the time World War II broke out, they’d turned from supporters to resistors. And they were students at the University of Munich when they formed the White Rose, a student-led resistance movement.

“We fight with our words,” Sophie said; and in June 1942, the first anti-Nazi leaflet appeared in Munich mailboxes. It was an eloquent plea for resistance and truth, aimed at the millions of Germans who shut their eyes to the brutalities enacted by their dictator. Each member of the White Rose understood the crime—high treason—and the punishment meted out to such offenders. “We were all aware we were risking our necks,” one member said.

A second leaflet soon followed, highlighting the mass deportation and killing of Jews, which they called “a crime . . . unparalleled in all of history.” A third, fourth, and fifth came in quick succession, landing in mailboxes, phone booths, and other public places around Munich and beyond. “Hitler cannot win the war, he can only prolong it,” the leaflets insisted, as Germany faced staggering losses on the Eastern Front during the Battle of Stalingrad.

With every pamphlet the risk of discovery increased, as the Gestapo scrambled to investigate the mysterious White Rose.

But to the Scholls, it was a risk worth taking. Raised Lutheran, they held deep convictions about the stand Christians should take against injustice. They quoted Scripture, along with the writings of prominent Christian thinkers, in every leaflet.”

2. One of the significant problems of the Book of Mormon is the dearth of corroborating archaeological evidence. This Science magazine article tells the story of a Mormon lawyer who revolutionized archaeology in Mexico and lost his faith:

“After decades of stressing the importance of the scientific method and using it to shore up his own faith, Ferguson now found himself at its mercy. “I must conclude that Joseph Smith had not the remotest skill in things Egyptian-hieroglyphics,” he wrote to a fellow doubting Mormon in 1971. What’s more, he wrote to another, “Right now I am inclined to think that all of those who claim to be ‘prophets’, including Moses, were without a means of communication with deity.”

This doubt ultimately spread to Ferguson’s archaeological quest. In 1975, he submitted a paper to a symposium about Book of Mormon geography outlining the failure of archaeologists to find Old World plants, animals, metals, and scripts in Mesoamerica. “The real implication of the paper,” he wrote in a letter the following year, “is that you can’t set Book of Mormon geography down anywhere—because it is fictional.”

Although open about his doubts in his private letters, Ferguson didn’t discuss his loss of faith with his family. He continued attending church, singing in the choir, and even giving blessings. “[Mormons] are so immersed in that culture … [that] to lose your faith, it’s like you’re being expelled from Eden,” Coe says. “I felt sorry for him.””

3. Andrew Peterson's recent album is exquisite. This is the story behind one of the songs with an opportunity to hear it. 

“When we went to the Garden of Gethsemane, I knelt near the fence that surrounds the ancient olive trees and read Psalm 22, which opens with, “My God, my God! Why have you forsaken me?” The entire psalm, which foreshadows Jesus’s suffering in a very specific way, would have been on his mind as he was first abandoned by his friends and then subjected to torture.

By the time we left Gethsemane, I was weeping. That’s no exaggeration. I couldn’t stop crying as I asked God the same question: “Why did you forsake him?” And my question to Jesus was, “Why were you willing to be forsaken?” The writer of Hebrews gives us an answer in chapter 12, which says that it was for the joy set before him that he endured the cross, despising its shame, and is now seated at the right hand of the Father. What joy? The joy of seeing his world and his people redeemed; the joy of the glory he brought himself by making every sad thing come untrue; the joy of making us his sons and daughters.”

4. A recent article from the Acton Institute relates data that indicates individualist, free market societies tend to produce more generous citizens.

“Individualist societies see people precisely as individuals. It is the defining mark of the Parable of the Good Samaritan, who ignored ethnic loyalties to care for a fellow human being in dire circumstances. In the Eastern Christian tradition, Jesus is identified with the Good Samaritan and referred to as O Filanqropos, “the Lover of Mankind.” Christians are called to respond to His initiative by proactively seeking out opportunities to care for the His suffering children.

In light of the data, March concluded that “equating individualism, and the wealth that promotes it, with selfishness may be a mistake.” (One wishes she used a stronger verb than may, but one may forgive an academic.) She would have found another confluence by noting the most philanthropic nations’ relative positions on the Fraser Institute’s world ranking of economic freedom: U.S. (13), Australia (7), New Zealand (3), Canada (5), and the UK (10).

By the same logic above, mutatis mutandis, you could conclude that it is a mistake to ascribe the promotion of a free market economy to selfishness, or “greed.” Those of us who promote economic freedom and a free and virtuous society do so precisely because it aids those most in need: the isolated individual with no community to care for him or her – and because it frees the rest of us to become Good Samaritans.”

5. There's a good chance a seal of Isaiah has been discovered, which adds additional archaeological evidence that supports the veracity of Scripture.

“Even in his own day, Isaiah was important. Not only did he reside in Jerusalem and have a close relationship with the kings of Judah, but subsequent generations added to his words and work. The majority of scholars believe that the Book of Isaiah should be divided into two if not three sections, with each being attributed to a separate author. The author of the second segment, Second Isaiah (Isaiah 40-55), is thought to have written during the exile and predicted the return of the Jewish people from Babylon to Jerusalem. What the incorporation of these later sections in to the book shows is that Isaiah was important enough that others wanted to use his memory to spread their message.


Now, for the first time, we have an example of what might be his signature. Not only is this proof that Isaiah existed (not something scholars truly disputed), but, arguably, evidence of his role in eighth century BCE Jerusalem society. Not everyone who had a seal was of elevated high status (as they were a means of solidifying identity), but the Bible does describe Isaiah as a counselor of the king to whom the monarch would turn for advice. The discovery of his seal impressions in close proximity to that of King Hezekiah confirms the picture of a court prophet that we get from the Bible.”

Worth Reading - 2/16

1. An Atlantic article discusses the increasing academic rigor and decreasing results of pre-schools as society tries to move basic skills to premature developmental stages:

“Until recently, school-readiness skills weren’t high on anyone’s agenda, nor was the idea that the youngest learners might be disqualified from moving on to a subsequent stage. But now that kindergarten serves as a gatekeeper, not a welcome mat, to elementary school, concerns about school preparedness kick in earlier and earlier. A child who’s supposed to read by the end of kindergarten had better be getting ready in preschool. As a result, expectations that may arguably have been reasonable for 5- and 6-year-olds, such as being able to sit at a desk and complete a task using pencil and paper, are now directed at even younger children, who lack the motor skills and attention span to be successful.


Preschool classrooms have become increasingly fraught spaces, with teachers cajoling their charges to finish their “work” before they can go play. And yet, even as preschoolers are learning more pre-academic skills at earlier ages, I’ve heard many teachers say that they seem somehow—is it possible?—less inquisitive and less engaged than the kids of earlier generations. More children today seem to lack the language skills needed to retell a simple story or to use basic connecting words and prepositions. They can’t make a conceptual analogy between, say, the veins on a leaf and the veins in their own hands.”

2. The Babylon Bee provides a TL;DR version of the 66 books of the Bible. This is snort worthy in aggregate.

“Job – Hebrew country music song.
Psalms – An ancient Hillsong album with sheep metaphors instead of ocean metaphors.
Proverbs – GOD PITIES THE FOOL WHO DON’T FOLLOW HIM.
Ecclesiastes – Everything is meaningless, except everything isn’t really meaningless because God gives everything meaning. Whoa.
Song of Solomon – Go ask your parents.”

3. Reactions to Jordan Peterson have been mixed, but he seems to have a large audience of young adult males. Anthony Bradley considers why that might be in a recent article:

“Boomers and GenXers continued to browbeat, berate, and shame Millennials and GenZ teens for trying to numb their shame with drugs, alcohol, video games, sexual promiscuity, pornography, and so on. The shame that young men carried was re-shamed by ministry leaders who wanted these men to feel low enough for the gospel. What they didn’t understand was that these young men were acquainted with lowliness. A large percentage of men born after 1990 already felt weak, beaten down, and worthless. Young men needed empathetic pastors to build them up to be the men that God created them to be.

Jordan Peterson is the prophet who understands this reality. As an observant Jungian and college professor, Peterson knows that thirty years of raising men in a culture that destroyed the archetypal, aspirational Jesus needs the antidote of empathy, encouragement, and practical day-to-day imagination to help men recover their souls so that they can live a life that means something.”

4. Alan Jacobs dissects the First Things article which supported the Roman Catholic abduction of a child from a Jewish family in the mid-20th century:

“Which leads me, finally, to the one point I want to make. Imagine that I, an Anglican, were the editor of First Things, and I published an essay by a priest of the Church of England arguing that Elizabeth I was perfectly justified in carrying out her lengthy persecution of English Catholics, since she was ordained by God as His royal servant implementing the True Biblical Faith in England, and the Roman Catholic Church by contrast is the Whore of Babylon as described in the Revelation to John. Imagine further that I responded to criticism by saying that I don’t agree with that argument but find that it challenges me in salutary ways. Would Catholic readers of the magazine be mollified by that explanation? I suspect not — even if my wife were a Catholic and my children were being raised in that communion.

Of course, the real-world First Things would never run such an essay, any more than it would run an essay by a Muslim arguing that the right and proper place of Christians and Jews in the world is dhimmitude under a restored Caliphate, or one by a Jew arguing that Christianity in all its forms is necessarily and intrinsically anti-Semitic and should therefore be repudiated and marginalized by all right-thinking people. As I have noted several times on this blog and elsewhere, the Overton window of acceptable positions for First Things articles has been moving for several years now, but moving in only one direction: towards an increasing acceptance of the claims of the Roman Catholic Church over against other religious communities. Whether it might be defensible for non-Catholics to be in a position of dhimmitude vis-a-vis Catholicism is a question to be asked in the pages of First Things; but the legitimacy of Catholicism is never similarly open to question. For some time now it has been quite clear who at First Things are the first-class citizens and who need to make their way the back of the cabin.”

5. This is not recently published, and certainly not new, but Abraham Kuyper's essay in response to the creeping socialism of his day is worth reading again.

“Just as surely, in the second place, we Christians are to take sides in the controversy between state and society. If you, like the social democrats, allow the state to be absorbed by society, you deny the political authority that God has established to uphold his supremacy and his justice. Conversely, if you, in line with the state socialists, allow society to be absorbed by the state, you offer incense to the deification of the state. You will be putting the state in the place of God and destroying a divinely ordered, free society for the sake of the apotheosis of the state. Against both positions we Christians must uphold the view that state and society each has its own sphere, or, if you will, each has its own sovereignty, and that the social question cannot be properly resolved unless we respect this duality and thus honor political authority while also clearing the way for initiatives from society.”

Worth Reading - 2/9

1. The recent case of the abusive family in California serves as a reminder of the compelling need for Christians to neighbor effectively.

“The Turpin case warns us against a cultural tide that veers away from this sacrificial love in favor of a pervasive complacency. Being a good neighbor in modern America means being civil and minding your own business. We ride subways with earbuds silencing our surroundings, and hide within ourselves while jammed in a city throng. The moment someone joins us in an elevator we feign interest in a newsfeed. We value niceness more than intimacy, privacy more than active fellowship. In The Neighboring Church, Rick Rusaw and Brian Mavis quote this wise comment from Ramin Razavi:

The reality is that nice falls in the middle of the affection spectrum. It’s not mean or disagreeable or awful, but it’s definitely not what Jesus did toward us. Nice neighboring is not enough. Loving God and our neighbors, as Jesus modeled love, means sacrifice.

We live in an era when technology dulls the fervor of Christian neighboring. We construct relationships through tweets rather than through real personal contact. We craft our identities and social circles in the glow of our smartphones, substituting Instagram for intimacy.”

2. We forget most of what we read or watch, but the experience is still formative.

“The lesson from his binge-watching study is that if you want to remember the things you watch and read, space them out. I used to get irritated in school when an English-class syllabus would have us read only three chapters a week, but there was a good reason for that. Memories get reinforced the more you recall them, Horvath says. If you read a book all in one stretch—on an airplane, say—you’re just holding the story in your working memory that whole time. “You’re never actually reaccessing it,” he says.

Sana says that often when we read, there’s a false “feeling of fluency.” The information is flowing in, we’re understanding it, it seems like it is smoothly collating itself into a binder to be slotted onto the shelves of our brains. “But it actually doesn’t stick unless you put effort into it and concentrate and engage in certain strategies that will help you remember.””

3. There are common patterns in a good testimony of God's faithfulness. Turns out, there are common patterns in convincing testimonies when people turn away from their faith, as is evidenced by a recent interview with Jen Hatmaker. Michael Kruger breaks it down on his blog:

“When it comes to reaching the “lost,” one of the most tried-and-true methods is the personal conversion story. Whether done privately or publicly, it’s compelling to hear a person’s testimony about how they came to believe in the truth of the Gospel, the truth of the Bible, and embraced the Christian faith. Such testimonies can personalize and soften the message so it is more easily understood and received.

But when it comes to reaching the “found,” there’s an equally effective method—and this is a method to which the evangelical church has paid very little attention. It’s what we might call the de-conversion story.

De-conversion stories are designed not to reach non-Christians but to reach Christians. And their purpose is to convince them that their crusty, backwards, outdated, naïve beliefs are no longer worthy of their assent. Whether done privately or publicly, this is when a person simply gives their testimony of how they once thought like you did and have now seen the light.”

4. [Note: This is not for the faint of heart.] A graphic description of how porn usage is impacting teenagers and their views on sex. For those seeking an understanding of the extent and future potential problems of pornography, this is an informative and well-researched article.

“These are not new power dynamics between girls and boys. In a 2014 British study about anal sex and teenagers, girls expressed a similar lack of sexual agency and experienced physical pain. In the survey, of 130 heterosexual teenagers age 16 to 18, teenagers often said they believed porn was a motivating factor for why males wanted anal sex. And among the guys who reported trying it, many said friends encouraged them, or they felt competitive with other guys to do it. At the same time, a majority of girls who had tried anal sex said they didn’t actually want to; their partners persuaded or coerced them. Some males took a “try it and see” approach, as researchers called it, attempting to put their finger or penis in a girl’s anus and hoping she didn’t stop them. Sometimes, one teenager reported, you “just keep going till they just get fed up and let you do it anyway.” Both boys and girls blamed the girls for pain they felt during anal sex and some told researchers the girls needed to “relax” more or “get used to it.” Only one girl said she enjoyed it, and only a few boys did. Teenagers may not know that even while porn makes it seem commonplace, in the 2009 national survey of American sex habits, most men and women who tried anal sex didn’t make it a regular part of their sex lives. And in another study, by Indiana University’s Debby Herbenick and others in 2015, about 70 percent of women who had anal sex said they experienced pain.”

5. Wesley Hill discusses the need for conscience protections for medical professionals in light of recent trends in activism to try to coerce all doctors and nurses to participate in morally objectionable practices.

“Rather, medical conscience prevents doctors and nurses from being forced to act in opposition either to their religious beliefs—e.g., commit a grievous sin—or to their moral consciences by being forced to participate in morally objectionable procedures, such as taking innocent human life in abortion, assisted suicide, or lethal injection euthanasia. It could also protect medical professionals from being required to administer hormones to inhibit puberty in adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria—a controversial recent innovation that the American College of Pediatricians has called “mass experimentation.” That opinion is becoming heterodox in the field, but surely no doctor should be forced in an elective procedure to act in a way that he believes actively harms the patient. The same goes for physicians who object to participating in sex-change surgeries based on the belief that sex is biologically determined or that it is wrong to remove healthy organs. Conscious protections should also apply to a doctor or nurse who objects to participating in infant circumcision based on a moral objection. And surely no doctor should be forced to participate in an execution, not even the administrative act of declaring the condemned prisoner dead after the execution.”

Worth Reading - 2/2

1. This interview with Rachel Denhollander, published by Christianity Today, is an important critique to the tendency among movements (not simply Evangelicals) to guard the brand. It is always justified, but never justifiable. The whole post is worth reading, but her conclusion is powerful.

“First, the gospel of Jesus Christ does not need your protection. It defies the gospel of Christ when we do not call out abuse and enable abuse in our own church. Jesus Christ does not need your protection; he needs your obedience. Obedience means that you pursue justice and you stand up for the oppressed and you stand up for the victimized, and you tell the truth about the evil of sexual assault and the evil of covering it up.

Second, that obedience costs. It means that you will have to speak out against your own community. It will cost to stand up for the oppressed, and it should. If we’re not speaking out when it costs, then it doesn’t matter to us enough.”

2. Alastair Roberts summarizes what pastors can learn from the viral professor, Jordan Peterson. This is well worth pondering.

“We live in a society that is cluttered with airy words, with glib evasions, with facile answers, with bullshitting, with self-serving lies, with obliging falsehoods, and with dishonest and careless construals of the world that merely serve to further our partisan agendas (‘truth’ merely becoming something that allows us to ‘destroy’ or ‘wipe the floor with’ our opponents in the culture). In such a context, a man committed to and burdened with the weight of truth and who speaks accordingly will grab people’s attention.

Christian pastors should be renowned for such truth-telling, for their commitment to speaking as if their words really mattered and for the courage to say what needs to be said, even when it is unpopular. This requires taking great care over one’s words. Weighty words are harder to speak. It also requires refusing to speak on many issues. When you weigh your words more carefully, you realize that you do not have weighty words to speak on many matters. The more easily you are drawn into unconsidered or careless speech (social media affording many traps here), the less value people will put on your words. The more seriously you take the truth, the more cautious you will be in your speech.”

3. Russell Moore wrote a lovely post for the Rabbit Room a few weeks ago on the importance of stories for ethics.

“Russell Kirk spoke of this as the shaping of the “moral imagination.” Stories, rightly told, shape us, almost always unconsciously at first. We vicariously are delighted or surprised or disgusted or outraged. It’s not just that we cognitively connect the dots but that, at some level, we actually experience these things. That power can be used in terrifying ways—see the use of Germanic volk myths in the rise of Hitler—or in life-giving, redemptive ways.

The prophet Nathan confronted King David with his sexual predation by telling the story of a wealthy man robbing the poor of his one ewe lamb (2 Sam. 12:1-15). This was not just to “illustrate” for David the meaning of the commandment against immorality. The story Nathan told bypassed the hardened conscience and the rationalizing intellect of David to allow him to experience horror and disgust at what turned out to be his own sin. Jesus did the same, repeatedly. The story of the “good Samaritan,” for instance, is again, not just an illustration but a vehicle for a resistant conscience to experience what it doesn’t want to acknowledge: compassion for the ‘outsider’ whom culture compelled to be ignored.

That’s how ethics works. It’s not simply that we are given a list of “dos” and “don’ts,” and we comply, or that we are convinced of all of the positive and negative consequences of our actions, and we are persuaded.”

4. This was an interesting book review at The Gospel Coalition about the impact international missionaries had on their sending countries after they came home.

“Regardless, for those willing to learn from history, the book is full of challenges. We can learn from these characters about what to do and what not to do. In a time when nationalism is on the rise, many evangelicals are more invested in making America great again than bearing witness and building bridges for a global and trans-ethnic church.

We can learn much from the cosmopolitan men and women in Protestants Abroad about how to question our own inherited biases and Westernized superiority complex, and how to open ourselves to understanding, appreciating, and advocating on behalf of people and cultures different from us.

Unlike the men and women in this book, however, we need not—and indeed must not—sacrifice our most powerful hope for cross-cultural reconciliation and peace: the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

5. Trevin Wax thinks aloud about the importance of words, particularly as it comes to the pro-life movement.

“The pro-life movement is at a crossroads. Should our focus be broad or narrow?

The narrow side sees itself as “abortion abolitionists,” in line with courageous people who sought to abolish slavery. Many younger activists find the “anti-abortion” label just as powerful as the label “anti-slavery” once was. There’s power in protesting one particular injustice.

The broad perspective pushes back: The abolitionists achieved the goal of ending slavery, but because it wasn’t unified on a broader vision of human dignity for black and brown people, the slave became the sharecropper, and segregation rushed in to fill the void.

The narrow side pushes back again: But would slavery have been abolished apart from a targeted focus on ending that particular injustice? In order to move the needle, the focus had to be extremely narrow, right?

This is the crux of the debate. Should we demand consistency on a number of issues under the big umbrella of being “pro-life,” or should we allow for inconsistencies because we are united around a targeted, more manageable goal of accomplishing one particular achievement (overturning Roe v. Wade, for example)? Is there a way for groups with radically diverging views on a number of cultural issues (atheists for life, pagans for life, feminists for life) to focus on ending abortion?

By broadening the meaning of “pro-life,” we run the risk of alienating people who would join forces with us against the travesty of abortion. By narrowing the meaning to “anti-abortion,” we make room for inconsistencies that may seem hypocritical and harm the overall cause.

Pro-life or anti-abortion? There’s a lot riding on the name.”

Worth Reading - 1/26

1. Could you preach the gospel to someone who had assaulted you and violated your trust? Rachel Denhollander did just that in the recent sentencing hearing of the former US Gymnastics doctor:

“In our early hearings. you brought your Bible into the courtroom and you have spoken of praying for forgiveness. And so it is on that basis that I appeal to you. If you have read the Bible you carry, you know the definition of sacrificial love portrayed is of God himself loving so sacrificially that he gave up everything to pay a penalty for the sin he did not commit. By his grace, I, too, choose to love this way.

You spoke of praying for forgiveness. But Larry, if you have read the Bible you carry, you know forgiveness does not come from doing good things, as if good deeds can erase what you have done. It comes from repentance which requires facing and acknowledging the truth about what you have done in all of its utter depravity and horror without mitigation, without excuse, without acting as if good deeds can erase what you have seen this courtroom today.”

2. G. K. Chesterton once engaged on the topic of evolution and his thought on this, like many things, is engaging and thought provoking.

“It’s not just that gorillas have never made the tiniest step in this direction; neither have any other creatures. Moreover, none of us really expects that they ever will. “Common sense,” observes Chesterton, “must long ago have told us that the animals are not to all appearances evolving in that sense.”

“In that sense.” In a very real sense, man is the only animal that has evolved. In comparison, the other animals remain mired in the mud. The history of the human race is a history of spectacular accomplishment piled upon spectacular accomplishment. Moreover, from an evolutionary perspective, these forward thrusts occurred in the blink of an eye. Human progress is not measured in ages and ages of geological time but in mere decades. Things that were thought impossible forty years ago are now routine.

“We talk of wild animals,” wrote Chesterton, “but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out.” Animals may be plodding along under the rule of some natural evolutionary scheme, but man seems to be progressing by a different set of rules. In some ways human beings fit into the natural scheme of things, but in other ways they decidedly do not.”

3. Last week, I posted a link to a Jordan Peterson interview and noted that someone should do an point by point analysis. This week, someone did exactly that at The Atlantic:

“For one, those who credulously accept the interviewer’s characterizations will emerge with the impression that a prominent academic holds troubling views that, in fact, he does not actually believe or advocate. Some will feel needlessly troubled. And distorted impressions of what figures like Peterson mean by the words that they speak can only exacerbate overall polarization between their followers and others, and sap their critics of credibility to push back where they are wrong.

Lots of culture-war fights are unavoidable––that is, they are rooted in earnest, strongly felt disagreements over the best values or way forward or method of prioritizing goods. The best we can do is have those fights, with rules against eye-gouging.

But there is a way to reduce needless division over the countless disagreements that are inevitable in a pluralistic democracy: get better at accurately characterizing the views of folks with differing opinions, rather than egging them on to offer more extreme statements in interviews; or even worse, distorting their words so that existing divisions seem more intractable or impossible to tolerate than they are. That sort of exaggeration or hyperbolic misrepresentation is epidemic—and addressing it for everyone’s sake is long overdue.”

4. A helpful podcast from Christianity Today dealing with the reality of poverty:

Writer Rod Dreher’s recent comments on poverty and immigration have sparked intense criticism by Christians and non-Christians alike. In a recent post, Dreher wrote about his conflicted feelings on Trump’s derogatory remarks about African countries by drawing a comparison to immigrants from these countries and public housing: Let’s think about Section 8 housing. If word got out that the government was planning to build a housing project for the poor in your neighborhood, how would you feel about it? Be honest with yourself. Nobody would consider this good news. You wouldn’t consider it good news because you don’t want the destructive culture of the poor imported into your neighborhood. Drive over to the poor part of town, and see what a s---hole it is. Do you want the people who turned their neighborhood a s---hole to bring the s---hole to your street? No, you don’t. Be honest, you don’t. Russell Jeung has lived with his family for more than two decades in one of Oakland, California’s most dangerous neighborhoods. While Jeung loves his community, living in the Murder Dubs hasn’t always been easy. When he was a graduate student, his laptop was stolen. He’s also witnessed shootings and knows sex traffickers work out of his neighborhood. “Do we want the poor’s ‘destructive culture’? No, of course not. The poor don’t want the destructive culture in their own communities,” said Jeung, who is also the chair of Asian American studies department at San Francisco State University. “Nobody wants murder, violence, or theft...All God’s children long for his wholeness, long for life to be lived under his rule and to have that peace and justice.” Russell joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss our tendency to overly romanticize or stigmatize the poor, the best and worst times of life in Murder Dubs, and how Christians should decide where they live.

5. The so-called Billy Graham rule has been controversial in recent months because someone found a 20 year old rule that Mike Pence followed a version of it. Tim Challies has some interesting thoughts on the topic that seems much more divisive than it ought.

“I have often wondered how Billy Graham feels about having a rule named after him. And it’s not just any rule either, but one that has generated all kinds of controversy both within the church and outside of it. Having a name synonymous with marital faithfulness must be a joy; having a name synonymous with charges of puritanical prudishness must be a burden. I wonder if he’s been happy enough to hand it off to Mike Pence and let him carry the load for a while. (Definition: The Billy Graham/Mike Pence Rule establishes that a man will not put himself in situations in which he is alone with a woman who is not his wife.)

The Billy Graham/Mike Pence Rule bubbles up on a regular basis as a discussion that usually seems to generate considerably more heat than light. To be frank, I don’t much care how unbelievers feel about it, but do care quite a lot about how Christians feel about it. Even more so, I care how they feel about those who do or do not hold to it. What follows are some of my thoughts on the Rule.”

Worth Reading - 1/19

1. Putting people to work is a strong social good, but is it a proper aim for government? Anne Bradley at the Institute for Faith, Work and Economics examines whether the goal should be to enable wealth creation or simply to put everyone to work.

“Jobs are a means of creating value by serving others with excellence. This is one way we fulfill the cultural mandate in Genesis 1:28.

It is easy to get caught up in the hype when government programs tout how many jobs they are creating. It’s important to remember, though, that governments can’t create wealth.

The government is not a business that sells things. The goods and services the government “provides” are paid for through taxation and currency inflation. This imposes a tradeoff; the cost is opportunities that would have been available to the taxpayer if the government had not chosen to use that money for the good or service.

When a business does not provide goods or services that people demand at the price they are willing to pay, it incurs losses. These losses, while difficult to endure, are important feedback mechanisms. They help correct inefficient behavior, allowing the business to better steward scarce resources.

Governments do not operate under profits and losses, so it is difficult for them to know whether they are being effective stewards of our scarce resources.”

2. An intriguing article from Smithsonian Magazine about huge underwater caverns discovered in Mexico:

“Last week, explorers with the Great Maya Aquifer Project discovered a connection between two large underwater caverns on the Yucatan Peninsula. When combined, the two systems create a 215-mile-long underground labyrinth—the largest flooded cavern on Earth, reports National Geographic.

While the cave itself is an interesting geologic formation, the cave system is also full of pre-Hispanic archaeological sites from the ancient Maya as well as unknown plant and animal species. “This immense cave represents the most important submerged archaeological site in the world, as it has more than a hundred archaeological contexts,” says Guillermo de Anda, director of the project, according to a translated press release. “Along this system, we had documented evidence of the first settlers of America, as well as extinct fauna and, of course, Maya culture.” In fact, in 2014, divers found the oldest human skeleton discovered in the New World while exploring one of the segments of this submerged cavern, Sac Actun.

As National Geographic reports, the discovery was made after the project’s divers began a new phase of exploring the Sac Actun system and another known as Dos Ojos last March, mapping new tunnels and underground lakes, known as cenotes. They were also looking for a connection between the two. After months of exploration, they finally found it: a subsurface connection near the city of Tulum, Reuters reports. According to cave-naming protocols, the larger system will absorb the smaller system and the whole complex will be known as Sac Actun.”

3. In a bid to make the Statists' dreams a little closer to reality, New York is attempting to give the public education system the right to shut down private, religious institutions. Proponents will argue this is to ensure the students get a "proper" education. Opponents will recognize this is an attempt to enforce the idea that the State owns all the people, especially the children, and thus has the right to trump decisions made by parents.

“In 1972, New York enacted a law to help pay for “secular educational services for pupils in nonpublic schools.” But the Supreme Court struck it down the following year, claiming it violated the First Amendment and would lead to excessive governmental involvement with religion. A kind of détente has reigned since; New Yorkers can choose where their children go to school, and the state can neither fund private and religious schools nor meddle in their affairs. The state Education Department requires nonpublic schools to provide instruction that is “substantially equivalent” to that of nearby public schools. The standard has worked well, inviting neither controversy nor legal challenges.

The new guidelines will upend the status quo by imposing additional instructional requirements and giving local school districts the power to shut down parochial and private schools deemed not to be “substantially equivalent.” Local officials will even gain the authority to initiate Family Court proceedings against parents whose children are enrolled in schools that don’t measure up.

Even worse, while current guidelines kick in only after “serious concerns” have been established about the instruction at a nonpublic school, the new regulations will mandate regular inspections of the offerings at private and parochial schools. State officers will review curriculum and instructional materials, sit in on classes, and interview teachers.

These new regulations signal the convergence of the nanny state and the secular state. The result will be a government with no inclination to defer to parental choice or acknowledge the religious values that lead families to parochial schools. ”

4. From Ray Ortlund at The Gospel Coalition, how one Reformation Church studied the Old Testament:

“Led by Zwingli, the church in Zurich studied the Old Testament at a level of care which will doubtless amaze us today but which was certainly an evidence of the power of the Spirit in their midst. A contemporary account paints the picture:

“This gathering began with intercessions. Uniting in common forms of prayers, they supplicated the almighty and merciful God, whose word is a lantern unto our feet and a light unto our paths, to open and enlighten our mind, that we might understand his oracles purely and holily, and be transformed into that which we had rightly understood, and that in this we might in no way displease his majesty, through Christ our Lord.

After prayers, a very young man, a scholar of the church, read over side by side with the Vulgate, which they call Jerome’s version, that passage at which they had, in the due progress of exegesis, arrived for discussion. It should be said that persons of good and promising intelligence are supported by a payment from the ecclesiastical chest and educated in arts, languages and sacred literature, that they may one day repay the church by whom they are supported and be of the greatest service in the sacred offices . . . .

When the young man who had read in Latin the passage which came up for discussion, a Hebrew reader rose and repeated the passage in Hebrew, occasionally pointing out the idioms and peculiarities of the language, sometimes giving a rendering of the sense, sometimes translating word for word, and moreover reading the comments of the Grammarians and Rabbis. . .
”

5. This interview on BBC4 of Jordan Peterson, the Canadian professor who has made international headlines for being confidently classically liberal, is an exemplary display of the appropriate use of rhetoric in response to a hostile and infantile interviewer. His care with words, more than the content, is what makes this worth watching as the interviewer repeatedly baits him by trying to twist his words and ignorantly misrepresenting what he has just said. This interview is worthy of play-by-play breakdown, even if you don't agree with him on all counts.

Worth Reading - 1/12

Here are some links worth reading this weekend:

1. An excellent post by Bekah Mason, who has recently become an adoptive mother. This is beautifully written, engaging, and thoughtful.

“Twenty years ago, my parents gave a rightfully Brit lit obsessed teen a copy of The Complete Tales of Winnie-the-Pooh as a graduation gift. Having only recently rediscovered my love of reading, I was ecstatic to have it. And I flipped through it. And then I started two summer jobs followed by school and Rush, and suddenly I was much too cool and adult for Pooh.

But Pooh stayed with me, through a college transfer and back home again. To grad school and back home. Again. And through eight moves in the last decade. There was Pooh, always near my desk and heart, but with his binding never broken. Because that Pooh, the heavy one with the satin ribbon to mark your place and a small picture on each page, was meant to be shared with others. You read this Pooh aloud.

And while the first person who called me Aunt B will turn 17 this year, and my niece will be 8 next month, I never read that Pooh to any niece or nephew, whether they called me Aunt B by choice or by blood. Taking Pooh to another’s house just seemed strange.

So when the kids started staying with me for respite weekends, I thought about starting them with Pooh. But if you’ve ever tried holding a sprawling two-year-old and a 7 pound book, you know why that didn’t happen.

There was more than just a perpetual motion machine preventing the reading of Pooh by this time. To finally pull him off the shelf and read him would seem so final, and nothing has felt final these last two years.”

2. Trevin Wax gives a brief defense of evangelical sub-culture:

“For decades now, I’ve read books and articles that criticize the Christian entertainment industry for its tendency to mimic broader cultural trends instead of lead them, or for sacrificing artistic integrity in order to find financial success with less artistically minded Christians. The Christian subculture, they say, produced music and movies that were cheesy, subpar, and “subtle-as-a-hammer.”

On the rare occasion when something truly creative appeared (VeggieTales) or when an artist found appreciation outside the subculture (Amy Grant, Switchfoot, Lecrae), Christians complained of “watered-down content” or accused people of sacrificing the gospel’s integrity for mainstream success.

Talk about a no-win situation for Christian moviemakers and musicians! If the message has to always trump the medium, you’re pushed into sacrificing artistry. If you’re not super clear with the message, you alienate fans who want clarity, not subtlety (and probably aren’t looking to you for great artistry anyway).”

3. This is not for the faint of heart, but it is an intriguing article from the BBC about the Tatooist of Auschwitz--a prisoner assigned to put identification marks on other incoming prisoners.

“As the tetovierer, Lale lived a step further away from death than the other prisoners.

He ate in an administration building. He was given extra rations. He slept in a single room. When his work was done, or when there were no new prisoners to tattoo, he was allowed free time.

”He never, ever saw himself as being a collaborator,” Morris says.

It was a real concern after the war - many saw the prisoners who worked for the SS at the camps as having taken part in their brutality.

”He did what he did to survive. He said he wasn’t told he could have this job or that job,’’ says Morris.

”He said you took whatever was being offered. You took it and you were grateful because it meant that you might wake up the next morning.”

Despite his privileges, the threat of not waking up the next day was ever present. ”

4. Robert Miller explains the injustice of a Roman Catholic abduction of a child improperly baptized. This is a helpful discussion of the problems of the abuse of power by the state, even when someone likes the general outcome.

“This is exactly what the statist always misses: that there are moral principles applicable to the state governing its conduct. The statist impulse is to ignore these principles and act as if the state should bring about whatever is good and right and suppress whatever is wrong and bad. To be fair to the statist, this impulse is often well-meaning, but in morals good intentions are not enough; the means chosen to effect those intentions must be good too. This applies to the state no less than to individuals.

The point is clear from examples, even ones from the order of purely natural morality. If I am rich and meet someone who is poor, I may have a moral obligation to give him some of my money, but this does not imply that the state is morally permitted to take my property and give it to him. Similarly, if my brother wrongs me and is truly sorry, I have a moral obligation to forgive him; if I fail to do so, however, the state has no right to compel me to do so by force. Examples from the order of supernatural morality (as understood in Catholic theology) are even clearer. Everyone has an obligation to seek baptism and to worship the Holy Trinity, but it is nevertheless wrong for the state to punish those who choose not to do these things. Nor are such conclusions at all surprising: we should all, of course, try to get others to do what morality (including supernatural morality) requires of them, but this does not imply that all means whatever are licit when pursuing this noble end. For private persons, the means of rational persuasion are always permissible, but force almost always is not (self-defense is an exception). Although the state may resort to force in many cases in which private persons may not (for instance, in punishing evildoers), even the state may not use force willy-nilly in pursuing good ends.”

5. This podcast from NPR's Planet Money offered a really intriguing explanation of how money transfers work in the ACH system:

Worth Reading - 1/5

Here are some links worth reading this weekend:

1. This isn't new, but Jen Wilkin wrote a helpful article about raising expectations for students in youth ministry. If you have kids or go to a church where there are kids, this is worth considering:

“Today’s high schoolers learn physics and calculus and foreign languages. They are expected to annotate literature and draw critical conclusions about its meaning. They complete hours of homework. They seek tutoring when a subject is difficult. They work hard to learn because learning points to definable future outcomes. They are disciples of their teachers, learning with great discipline the various disciplines those teachers instruct.

By contrast, when these same students show up at church to be discipled in their faith, what will be asked of them? Have a quiet time for ten minutes each day. Read a few verses and journal about them. Listen to a testimony. Read a devotional book. Discuss what you’re reading with some of your peers once a week.”

2. In essay that cites Wilkin's article from above, Trevin Wax lists three reasons we shouldn't tell people that reading Scripture is easy:

“In a valiant effort to get people into God’s Word, pastors and church leaders sometimes stress the simplicity and ease of Bible reading. We want to make the Bible seem more accessible than it is with the hope that more people will read it. This is the wrong approach.

It’s true that, at one level, it’s easy to pick up the Bible and read the words on the page. But at the deeper level of reading (the act of interpreting correctly and applying well), we face a number of challenges. When we minimize these challenges, we also minimize the great reward that comes from devoting ourselves to something difficult, a Book that demands something of us.”

3. From the blog of the International Mission Board, a post with reasons The Lord of the Rings makes a good companion for missionaries:

“My flight to South Asia took me farther away from home than I’d ever been in more ways than geographical. I stepped off that plane and deep into a land of shadow, a land where precious few had heard of the Light of the world. But Tolkien’s world was a familiar path through a strange forest. I could journey with Strider and his hobbits as they journeyed with me, and they gave me space to feel my homesickness while staying true to my quest. “I feel,” as Frodo does, “that as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable: I shall know that somewhere there is a firm foothold, even if my feet cannot stand there again.” Middle-Earth was warm and familiar, even if it was fantasy, and I needed that breath of familiar air as home faded fast behind me.

Because, for many missionaries, even the flight back to the States is not truly a homecoming. We’ve changed. We no longer fit into the spaces we left. We’re surrounded by friends and family who love us deeply but who can’t really understand the world we’ve seen, any more than Sam’s Gaffer could understand the songs of Lórien or the dungeons of Moria.”

4. For no reason other than it might interest the curious, here is a list from Smithsonian Magazine of ancient documents of significance that have been lost:

“Sibylline Books
Roman leaders consulted these oracular sayings during political crises for perhaps 900 years. The originals burned in 83 B.C. Their replacements were allegedly destroyed by a 5th-century Roman general who feared that invading Visigoths would use them.

Sappho’s Poems
In the 6th century B.C. she composed 10,000 lines of poetry, filling nine volumes. Fewer than 70 complete lines exist. But those have made Lesbos’ most famous daughter (as classicist Daniel Mendelsohn has called her) a revered lyric poet of erotic love.

Aeschylus’ Achilleis
The famed Greek dramatist’s (c. 525-456 B.C.) tragic trilogy is thought to have reframed the Trojan War as a reckoning with contemporary Athenian democracy. An estimated total of more than 80 of his works are lost to history. Seven plays survive.”

5. Christians need to balance the urge to go with the urge to stay and build into the lives of their community. This long-form essay from The Gospel Coalition gives a helpful perspective that may encourage some of those who stay behind.

““Do you want to move to New Zealand?”

We were only two years out of school, married three, when he said these words. Neither of us wanted to stay in the mid-sized Southern city where we’d attended university and seminary, but without a clear call somewhere else, we were beginning to feel directionless. Then one day, he found a short-term position with a church more than 8,000 miles away.

“Sure.” I shrugged and shifted my attention back to our 4-month-old daughter. “Why not?”

Growing up, we’d heard from those who had left family and country to follow Christ. They assured us that just as Christ is right here with you now, he will be present with you there. And we believed them. But we’d learned something else, something they didn’t necessarily say.

Somehow, we’d gotten the idea that spiritual maturity meant uncoupling ourselves from dependence on any one place. To be unfettered by geography—to be willing to go anywhere—seemed next to godliness. Because if God is everywhere, then he’s nowhere in particular, and if God is everywhere, then it doesn’t really matter where you go. The prevention for homesickness, it seemed, was simply to never need home in the first place.

But if God is everywhere, then how can you know for sure where you’re supposed to be?

The paradox of place is that while God may exist everywhere, human beings don’t. Made from the dust of the earth, we’re forever linked to it and can no more escape its boundaries than we can escape ourselves. In fact, we each owe our existence, at least in some small way, to geography. We can’t trace our heritage without simultaneously tracing the map, the places where our forebears lived and loved forever bound up in the strands of our DNA.”

Worth Reading - 12/29

Here are some links worth reading this weekend:

1. Consider how you use your leisure time. Free time isn't free. Redeem the time:

“Even though our society’s conceptions of free time don’t bring true rest, health, or flourishing, Christians often buy into them. To enjoy leisure well, then, we need to understand God’s reign over leisure and his purposes for it.

First, Christians must recognize that all of our time comes under the Lordship of Christ, whether we’re working or recreating. God doesn’t care just about our work; he cares about our time. Even in our free time, we’re responsible to God for our use of it. We don’t have a pass to do whatever we want.”

2. Alastair Roberts put together a solid post about the nature of the gospel regarding some recent discussions in the Twitter-sphere. Even if you are blissfully unaware of the kerfuffle, the article is worth your time.

“ In our world, ‘gospel’ has become a heavily-charged floating signifier, which has become unmoored from its biblical particularity. Christians can treat the specificity of the biblical narrative as if it were a launch pad from which the rocket of a universal and deracinated ‘Gospel’ were propelled into the orbit of the earth. While the biblical narrative is one of a very particular people and God’s historical dealings with them, the ‘Gospel’ is a departicularized and dehistoricized declaration of justification by grace through faith alone for the individual in need of salvation. The word ‘gospel’ then becomes attached to all sorts of other terms in various forms, to give them an added oomph of piety (e.g. ‘gospel-centred’).

Yet this doesn’t work. The biblical gospel is a highly particular message. It is a message that comes at the fulness of time, to a particular people, and has a highly specific context and content. It isn’t about a timeless mode of salvation or a universal soteriology of grace, but about the particular declaration that God has visited his people in the Messiah, bringing forgiveness and judgment to Israel, that his kingdom has been inaugurated and that it will be established over the whole world. All of this is summed up in the gospel proclamation: ‘Jesus is Lord!’”

3. An encouraging post by Aaron Earls at Facts and Trends about how the Word of God spread over 2017.

“Globally, the most shared, bookmarked, and highlighted Bible verse on the app this year was Joshua 1:9: “Haven’t I commanded you: be strong and courageous? Do not be afraid or discouraged, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.”

In the United States, the verse with the most interactions in the Bible App was Romans 8:28: “We know that all things work together for the good of those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.”

This year, YouVersion saw even more people turn to the Bible App to explore God’s Word, many in some unexpected places.

Downloads in India increased by 228 percent this year, while the number of downloads in Iraq grew by 155 percent. Mozambique saw downloads increase by 243 percent, and downloads in Angola jumped by 733 percent.”

4. One man gets around the drive to work by swimming:

“Benjamin David was fed up with the stress of commuting on busy city roads. So he now packs his laptop, suit and shoes into a waterproof bag, straps it to his back and swims 2km to work along the Isar River in Munich, Germany.

Depending on the season, he wears swimming trunks or a long wetsuit – as well as rubber sandals to protect his feet from glass or the occasional bicycle laying in the river.”

5. Destin Sandlin explodes a tomato and his sound guy discusses sound for slow motion films. This one's interesting, but mostly just fun.

Worth Reading - 12/22

Here are some links worth reading this weekend:

1. Anne Kennedy gives thanks for a tea maker. The essay is fun, but the grander point behind it is more significant: we live in an amazing world and are too seldom grateful for it.

“I trotted off to church last night for choir practice–three of my offspring are in the front row of the choir and are desperately trying to get ready for Lessons and Carols in a week–and there in the office was a big box and inside was this cunning Teasmade. I mean, what a delight! What a gift! (Literally) What an extraordinary device!

What you do is, you plug it in, uncork the little stopper at the top, pour water into the belly of the thing, screw the little lid back on, make sure the pot is mashed up against the sensor, and then program it to wake you up with the whoosh of water boiling and flinging itself into the pot. Then you just drink the tea. Two whole cups worth. It’s enthralling.

I mean, it didn’t make sense that over the last century that while one portion of the world was making coffee as instant and immediate an experience as possible–shaving off valuable soul crushing seconds from the moment you grasped your cup to the moment you felt the first swirl of life overtake your heart and brain–the other side of the world was not engaged in a similarly life saving quest. It’s just that I didn’t know about it. And the revelation is undoubtedly going to change mine.”

2. Aside from having progressives up in arms over his assertion that material comfort was not the primary purpose of Christ's life, Tim Keller wrote an important and timely piece for the New Yorker on the state of Evangelicalism.

“For centuries, renewal movements have emerged within Christianity and taken on different forms and names. Often, they have invoked the word “evangelical.” Followers of Martin Luther, who emphasized the doctrine of salvation by faith alone, described themselves in this way. The Cambridge clergyman Charles Simeon, who led the Low Church renewal movement within the Church of England, adopted the label. The trans-Atlantic eighteenth-century awakenings and revivals led by the Wesleys were also often called “evangelical.” In the nineteen-forties and fifties, Billy Graham and others promoted the word to describe themselves and the religious space they were seeking to create between the cultural withdrawal espoused by the fundamentalist movement, on the one hand, and mainline Protestantism’s departures from historic Christian doctrine, on the other. In each of these phases, the term has had a somewhat different meaning, and yet it keeps surfacing because it has described a set of basic historic beliefs and impulses.

When I became a Christian in college, in the early nineteen-seventies, the word “evangelical” still meant an alternative to the fortress mentality of fundamentalism. Shortly thereafter, I went to Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, to prepare for the Presbyterian ministry. It was one of the many institutions that Graham, Harold Ockenga, and J. Howard Pew, and other neo-evangelicals, as they were sometimes called, established. In those years, there was such great energy in the movement that, by the mid-nineteen-nineties, it had eclipsed mainline Protestantism as the dominant branch of the Christian church in the U.S. When I moved to Manhattan to start a new church, in 1989, most people I met found the church and its ministry to be a curiosity in secular New York but not a threat. And, if they heard the word “evangelical” around the congregation, a name we seldom used, they usually asked what it meant.”

3. An essay seeking understanding of the recent turn toward socialism at First Things. It is not necessary to agree with everything in this essay to see that the author makes some very good points about the shift of the magazine toward greater government and Roman Catholic authority over public life.

“Having missed the big picture in economics, Reno blames capitalism for other things that get him down, like the transgender movement. How does capitalism cause transgenderism? According to Reno, because of the extreme degree of economic freedom (he imagines) people have, they get used to choosing things, and this leads them to want to choose their genders too.

By its terms, Reno’s claim is an assertion that a set of economic circumstances causally produces certain normative beliefs about sexuality in the people who live in those economic circumstances. It is thus a bit of dialectical materialism, a philosophy with a deservedly bad reputation. But leaving aside its dubious pedigree, the claim is still an empirical one that is testable in various ways. For example, if Reno is right, then as economic freedom increases, people should expect and demand more sexual freedom. Is that how history really works?

It’s easy to see that it is not. For, the period of greatest economic freedom in the modern era was the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries up to the time of the First World War, an era of almost entirely free flows of goods, labor, and capital across international borders. At the time, most countries didn’t even require travelers to show passports, and there was virtually no regulation of the private economy except for the prohibitions on force and fraud and the enforcement of contracts. By Reno’s lights, this era of laissez-faire capitalism should have been the heyday of sexual liberation. In reality, however, it was the Victorian age, a time of the most repressive sexual mores, both socially and legally.”

4. Tim Keller sparked outrage among progressives who also identify as Christians by tweeting that Christ's earthly ministry was not primarily about bringing health, wealth, and happiness to the poor. This has led some progressives to call Evangelicals to redefine the gospel in social terms rather than soteriological ones. Jonathan Leeman has written a helpful response:

“And, for my part, I think that all of us, whether on the Left or Right, whether majority or minority, could do a better job in our theology of explaining the corporate shape and implications of the gospel. For instance, our entire elder board read Divided by Faith and benefited tremendously from its descriptions of racialization and structural injustices. You should read it, too. I’d agree with its critique of many conservative statements of faith: they can be overly individualistic.

But don’t look there for a better articulation of the gospel. Please, please, do not do away with sola fide. It alone offers the right and biblical asymmetry. Yet we need to do a better job of explaining its covenantal, corporate, and political meaning, as I have tried to do in a long-winded fashion here.

Please, please, do not do away with the call to individual conversion as the most important decision a person will ever make. But let’s recognize how deeply corporate this doctrine is, as I’ve also tried to demonstrate here. God saves us into a people.

And then there is the church. Goodness, yes, it’s political, as I argue here”

5. The U.S. has its first dark sky reserve, which would make star gazing absolutely amazing.

Worth Reading - 12/15

Here are some links worth reading this weekend:

1. In order to defend our goodness, we sometimes make bad people out as if they are wholly and irredeemably evil. Trevin Wax works through the question of evil with regard to a recent NYT article:

“We deceive ourselves if we think evil is relegated to “monsters,” or that evil beliefs take root in people who belong to a different class of humanity than ourselves. The disturbing thing about evil is that it’s everywhere, and most of the time, is not extreme.

In a recent article on this topic, Jared Wilson mentioned Hannah Arendt, who at the close of her famous book on the Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann, reiterated “the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”

Eichmann was “the faceless bureaucrat of death.” She claimed that “he personified neither hatred or madness nor an insatiable thirst for blood, but something far worse, the faceless nature of Nazi evil itself . . .”

At the time, many faulted Arendt for humanizing the war criminal. Even today, some contend that Eichmann faked his self-presentation as a mindless bureaucrat, a mere shuffler of papers. How else can we make sense of the way normality and bottomless cruelty coexist?

But history shows that evil and normalcy coexist in ways that boggle the mind. Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts documents how German bystanders refused to intervene when foreigners or Jews were assaulted in broad daylight for failing to offer the Nazi salute. When Milton Mayer interviewed ordinary Germans after the war, he documented the slow progression of small acts of evil or cowardice that led eventually to evil on a massive scale.”

2. Samuel James makes a good point, with the recent meteoric rise and fall of internet sensation, Keaton, that children and the internet really don't mix well:

“Stop me if you’ve heard this before.

A parent records their child doing/saying something moving/saddening/remarkable. The parent then posts the video of their child to social media. Social media reacts strongly to the video, and before you know it, the video—and the child—are “viral” digital sensations. They start trending on Buzzfeed, being re-shared by celebrities and athletes, and almost everyone seems to be talking about this child and what he or she said or did.

Unfortunately, the people of the internet start looking for some information about this child and his family. When they find some, it turns out that the family, and especially the parent who recorded the viral video, has some unsavory, even morally offensive social media posts on their account. Just as it did with the original video, the online “community” ensures that the new information about the family, including screenshots and pictures, goes viral.The same internet that was just a few days ago sharing the video with captions of admiration and appreciation is now outraged that any family or adult with such offensive ideas/posts could be given a platform.

This is precisely the story now of the video of Keaton, a young boy whose tears have been shared by many people in my social media feeds. Keaton is bullied at school, and his mother decided to record an emotional moment for her son and post it online. Oceans of sympathetic well-wishes poured in from millions of people who watched the video. But some Twitter users found the mother’s own Facebook account, where she posts pictures of her kids holding confederate battle flags and screeds against black NFL players who kneel during the national anthem. Just hours ago the online world wanted to support Keaton. Now they wish he and his family would go away.

Perhaps we need periodic reminders that children and the internet are not usually a good combination. I’m not trying to be holier-than-thou here. I’ve posted photos and videos of my son online, too. But this episode with Keaton and his family reminds me that I probably shouldn’t be comfortable about that fact. My concern is not that this family is being treated unfairly by an outraged online mob (though I think there might be a point to make about the inherently non-redemptive outrage of the internet). My concern is that Keaton’s vulnerable, emotionally fragile moment, a moment that thousands of other kids identify with every day, was broadcast to millions of strangers, the overwhelming majority of whom do not really care about him. The online fame paid off in one sense, and backfired horribly in another. Keaton’s grief over being bullied by people he knew in flesh and blood at the school is now compounded by the angry crowd that wants to hold him accountable for political and racial ideas likely far beyond his comprehension.

This just isn’t how it’s supposed to be. There are deeply troubling dynamics to online fame, and they only get worse when applied to children. Keaton’s anguish belonged off-camera. His very real heartbreak should never have been given to the masses. If Keaton’s mom thought online fame would balm her son’s wounds, she may have been right, but then what does that mean for Keaton going forward? Is the only suffering worth living through the suffering that can help us go viral?

The internet is a double-edged sword. Its greatest strength is that it can get anywhere. Its greatest threat is that it can get anywhere. Its pervasive presence in all aspects of public life is what gives the social media age its power for good, and its power for evil. When we stop thinking seriously about the costs of online life, we will start to sacrifice much, much more than our privacy.”

3. A short article explaining why having more books than you've read is a good thing intellectually:

“An antilibrary is a powerful reminder of your limitations - the vast quantity of things you don’t know, half know, or will one day realize you’re wrong about. By living with that reminder daily you can nudge yourself towards the kind of intellectual humility that improves decision-making and drives learning.

”People don’t walk around with anti-résumés telling you what they have not studied or experienced (it’s the job of their competitors to do that), but it would be nice if they did,” Taleb claims.

Why? Perhaps because it is a well known psychological fact that is the most incompetent who are the most confident of their abilities and the most intelligent who are full of doubt. (Really, it’s called the Dunning-Kruger effect). It’s equally well established that the more readily admit you don’t know things, the faster you learn.

So stop beating yourself up for buying too many books or for having a to-read list that you could never get through in three lifetimes. All those books you haven’t read are indeed a sign of your ignorance. But if you know how ignorant you are, you’re way ahead of the vast majority of other people.”

4. A terrible bumper sticker went viral. What it reveals, however, is that "evangelicalism" is old, sick, and tired and lacks the theological vigor that should come from knowing the wonder of Christ. Russell Moore's post on this topic is helpful:

“American evangelicalism is old and sick and weak, and doesn’t even know it. We are bored by what the Bible reveals as mysterious and glorious, and red-in-the-face about what hardly matters in the broad sweep of eternity. We clamor for the kind of power the world can recognize while ignoring the very power of God that comes through Christ and him crucified. We’ve traded in the Sermon on the Mount for slogans on our cars. We’ve exchanged Christ the King for Christ the meme. And through it all, we demonstrate what we care about—the same power and self-leverage this age already values.

Often our cultural and moral and political debates are important. Offering one’s opinion is fine and good, sometimes even necessary. But if our passions demonstrate that these things are most important to us, and to our identity, we have veered into a place we do not want to go. The most important word we have for the world around us, and for the soul within us, can indeed fit on a bumper sticker: “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.””

5. Desiring God recently posted a 20-year-old sermon by John Piper on how to honor God with your money. It's worth your time.

“The inner essence of worship is the treasuring of God as infinitely valuable above everything. The outer forms of worship are the acts that show how much we treasure God. Therefore, all of life is meant to be worship because God said whether you eat or drink or whatever you do — all of life — do it all to show how valuable the glory of God is to you (1 Corinthians 10:31). Money and things are a big part of life, and therefore God intends them to be a big part of worship — since all of life is to be worship. So the way you worship with your money and your possessions is to get them and use them and lose them in a way that shows how much you treasure God — not money. That’s what this text is about. And so it is really a text about worship.

Now there is a place for corporate worship — what we do here together on Sunday morning. And the same definitions hold here as everywhere else: the essence of worship here is the inner treasuring of God as infinitely valuable. And the forms of worship are the acts that express this inner treasuring of God (preaching and hearing the word of God, praying, singing, giving, sharing the Lord’s Supper, and so on). One of those acts of corporate worship here at Bethlehem is what we call “the offering” — a point near the middle of our corporate worship where we worship with our money, by putting it out of our hands and our banks, and into the mission and ministry of Christ.”

Worth Reading - 12/8

1. One man got frustrated with being hounded by debt collectors for debts he never incurred, this long-form story is about his quest to bring a fraud to justice.

“Therrien had been caught up in a fraud known as phantom debt, where millions of Americans are hassled to pay back money they don’t owe. The concept is centuries old: Inmates of a New York debtors’ prison joked about it as early as 1800, in a newspaper they published called Forlorn Hope. But systematic schemes to collect on fake debts started only about five years ago. It begins when someone scoops up troves of personal information that are available cheaply online—old loan applications, long-expired obligations, data from hacked accounts—and reformats it to look like a list of debts. Then they make deals with unscrupulous collectors who will demand repayment of the fictitious bills. Their targets are often poor and likely to already be getting confusing calls about other loans. The harassment usually doesn’t work, but some marks are convinced that because the collectors know so much, the debt must be real.

The problem is as simple as it is intractable. In 2012 a call center in India was busted for making 8 million calls in eight months to collect made-up bills. The Federal Trade Commission has since broken up at least 13 similar scams. In most cases, regulators weren’t able to identify the original perpetrators because the data files had been sold and repackaged so many times. Victims have essentially no recourse to do anything but take the abuse.”

2. There is something between Randian individualism and the smothering statism of socialism. John Mark Reynolds writes about muddling through a middle path:

“Instead, we must always remember: statism kills, radical individualism kills. We say no to Nimrod’s statism and Cain’s individualism. Why? Injustice can take place in systems, such as state sponsored segregation in the South of the USA, or from individuals as when the robber barons built factories that were unsafe and harmed workers. American Christians must reject radical individualism, we are part of a community, but also statism.

We refuse to say “I am Lord” or “Caesar is Lord.” If every man is Caesar, then we have simply multiplied tyrants. If we put all power in a state Caesar, then we have created anti-Christ.

Different eras have provoked different responses from Christians due to different needs. We have absolute moral principles (or should!), but can be flexible in applying them. American Christians have gotten this mostly right with the horrific exception of race.”

3. Joe Carter wrestles with the major problem of the bi-partisan smuttiness of politics that is leading some people to attempt to justify the unjustifiable. He outlines a non-partisan solution to the Roy Moore problem:

“If you want to see the future of Christian conservative politics you need to know about Wesley Goodman.

Goodman is a married, 33-year-old “family-values conservative” elected to the Ohio legislature last year. He had previously worked as an aide for a conservative congressman, and served as managing director for the Conservative Action Project and a member of the Council for National Policy, two organizations that serve as alliances of economic, social, and national-security conservatives.*

Earlier this month Goodman resigned from the legislature after he was caught engaging in “inappropriate behavior” (i.e., sexual behavior) with a man at his office. And it doesn’t seem to have been an isolated occurrence. Goodman had reportedly “exchanged salacious texts and emails with gay men he met on Capitol Hill, and sent sexually suggestive messages to young men he met through conservative circles who were too intimidated to publicly complain.”

One young man did complain, though. Two years ago Goodman allegedly invited an 18-year-old college student to his hotel room and attempted to sexually assault the teenager. The young man’s parents notified Goodman’s boss, the head of the Council for National Policy (CNP), who promised to take action. Goodman was dismissed from the CNP two months later, but when he ran for public office the pro-family Christian leaders never notified the people of Ohio they might be electing a sexual predator.”

4. An informative post about the coming population problem because of a rapidly declining birthrate:

“We are now in our 3rd-most-rapid period of fertility decline on record, after the 1920s drop and then the post-baby-boom decline. I expect that by 2018 or 2019, the U.S. will hit it’s lowest total fertility rate ever.

Guys this is dire stuff. But I want to zoom in on 2017 and elucidate just how crazy 2017 really is. Yes, the rate of decline was sharp, but it was also broad-based. Here’s a graph of every state’s 12-month lagged general fertility rate from 2007 to 2017. This metric makes some very basic controls for demographic composition, but is not as tightly-controlled as the total fertility rate, so is still somewhat impacted by age composition.”

5. Michael Bird and Bruce Ashford had a discussion about the Benedict Option. It's worth the time if you have a while to digest it:

Worth Reading - 12/1

1. Articles about people memorizing Scripture are always worthwhile, since it is a hard and undervalued spiritual discipline. This one is especially enjoyable, since it is written by the subject's son:

“One of the first areas where I encountered this different godliness was in his Bible knowledge. Every seminary professor or man in ministry knows his Bible, or at least would like to appear to know his Bible; so such a statement can seem a truism. Yet my exposure to this reality was more organic and thus made a stronger impression. We did morning and evening devotions as a family, and I knew my father read his Bible in the morning. But I also remember other occasions, such as Saturday afternoons, or evenings, or during vacation times, hearing—of all things—a sanctified hissing noise.

The noise would come from his bedroom, the door slightly ajar, and I discerned the cause of the hissing to be my father’s voice as he read the Bible to himself at a volume just above a whisper. The result, audible to someone outside the room, was a series of ‘s’ sounds echoing faintly in the hallway. When I peeked in, he would sometimes raise his eyes and offer the faintest smile before returning to the Scripture. He was always willing to be disturbed, but if left alone, he would proceed for long durations, reading large chunks in a sitting.”

2. There is little question that Evangelicals have some theological and political house cleaning to do. However, the ambiguity of the term "evangelical" in the public square, particularly surrounding polling, makes the term almost useless. Thomas Kidd here examines some of the debate surrounding what constitutes and evangelical:

“The most common definition of evangelicalism, one crafted by British historian David Bebbington, boils down to four key points. First is conversion, or the need to be born again. The second is Biblicism, or the need to base one’s faith fundamentally on the Bible. The third is the theological priority of the cross, where Jesus died and won forgiveness for sinners. The final attribute of evangelicals is activism, or acting on the mandates of one’s faith, through supporting your church, sharing the gospel, and engaging in charitable endeavors.

In today’s media, “evangelical” has shifted from the historic definition to become more of a rough political and ethnic signifier. What today’s “evangelicals” have in common is not so much Biblicism or action for the gospel, but a self-defined sense of religiosity and a dogged commitment to Republican politics. And being white.

Evangelical faith has always had political ramifications, of course. For example, many evangelicals fought in the era of the American Revolution to end the tax-supported denominations, which had often persecuted evangelicals. But evangelicals were not much on the political radar screen in modern America until 1976, with the candidacy of the “born again” Jimmy Carter.”

3. Trevin Wax reminds us that technology is meant to serve humans, not be our masters. Don't pretend you can't control some of the influence of technology in your life:

“So, enough with the silly idea that every technological advance is set in stone and that cultural changes are irresistible, especially if certain habits prove detrimental to the life we want for ourselves! We can make choices in line with the vision of what we want our world to be like, or at least, we can make choices in line with the vision of what we want to be like in our world.

If we don’t want our homes held hostage by glowing rectangles, we can limit our time on devices, or we can do away with smartphones altogether. What king or queen has invaded your house and demanded you hand your fifth grader a smartphone? Mom and Dad, you are the authority in your castle. You are responsible for the culture you create. If a phone helps accomplish the vision of what you want your home to be, then have at it! If it doesn’t, toss it out. But don’t abdicate your kingdom and fall helplessly before the throne of Apple or Samsung.

Readers, if you love to read on your phone or on Kindle, then thank God for the accessibility of today’s e-readers. But if you prefer the smell and feel of a printed book, then please, keep your library. Even more, why not add to it? Be part of the movement that continues to surprise the publishing world—the leveling off of ebook sales and the resurgence of print (hardcover even!). A Kindle can be a terrific aid to reading; don’t let it turn into a tyrant come to burn your books.

Workers, feel free to experiment with different environments and new ideas. But treat them like experiments. Don’t assume they can’t be reconsidered or revisited or revised.”

4. Anne Kennedy has some thoughts on the Matt Lauer scandal. Basically, it all comes down to needing the gospel.

“Let me speak slowly and distinctly. This Is The Moment For The Gospel. For the person who has sinned, who has broken faith, who has abused and manipulated, for the one who let himself down, who used women as objects, who hurt another and didn’t care, indeed for anyone who rebels against God’s divine and provident law–that’s everyone, in case you’re wondering–God Himself Came to provide a remedy. He took on our broken human deluded condition and carried the burden and ugliness of sin, even sexual sin, to the cross. There he died and was then buried and on the third day he rose again, and thereafter ascended into heaven where he sits at the right hand of the father interceding for all those who are so desperate for help and forgiveness.

What you have to do if you have behaved very badly is to fling yourself onto his mercy. Lie down on your single, empty, corrupted bed and cry out to him for help and mercy and forgiveness. Say, ‘I have sinned against heaven and against you and I am not worthy to be called a son.’ Admit that you aren’t who you thought you were, that you cannot do the right thing. In other words, repent of your sin.”

5. This video is a humorous tribute to a healthy marriage and a significant sacrifice:

Worth Reading - 11/24

1. This opinion piece by David Brooks from the New York Times helps explain why liberalism (in its classical meaning) is failing in society. Certainly worth your time to read:

“Freedom without covenant becomes selfishness. And that’s what we see at the top of society, in our politics and the financial crisis. Freedom without connection becomes alienation. And that’s what we see at the bottom of society — frayed communities, broken families, opiate addiction. Freedom without a unifying national narrative becomes distrust, polarization and permanent political war.

People can endure a lot if they have a secure base, but if you take away covenantal attachments they become fragile. Moreover, if you rob people of their good covenantal attachments, they will grab bad ones. First, they will identify themselves according to race. They will become the racial essentialists you see on left and right: The only people who can really know me are in my race. Life is a zero-sum contest between my race and your race, so get out.

Then they resort to tribalism. This is what Donald Trump provides. As Mark S. Weiner writes on the Niskanen Center’s blog, Trump is constantly making friend/enemy distinctions, exploiting liberalism’s thin conception of community and creating toxic communities based on in-group/out-group rivalry.”

2. Restaurants may be playing mind games with your menu. This informative and interesting article from BBC tells you how:

“The words used to describe a food, however, may do far more than make them sound enticing – they can make our mouths water. A study from the University of Cologne in Germany last year showed that by cleverly naming dishes with words that mimic the mouth movements when eating, restaurants could increase the palatability of the food. They found words that move from the front to the back of the mouth were more effective – such as the made up word “bodok”.
The effect seems to even work when reading silently, perhaps because the brain still stimulates the motor movements required to produce speech when reading. This masticatory effect, the authors suggest, gets our saliva glands working.”

3. According to multiple outlets, including Christianity Today, Chinese Christians are being required to remove Christian symbols from their homes and replace them with pictures of their new president.

“Thousands of Christian villagers in China have been told to take down displays of Jesus, crosses, and gospel passages from their homes as part of a government propaganda effort to “transform believers in religion into believers in the party.”

The South China Morning Post (SCMP) reports that Communist Party of China (CPC) officials visited believers’ homes in Yugan county of Jiangxi province—where about 10 percent of the population is Christian. They urged residents to replace personal religious displays with posters of President Xi Jinping; more than 600 removed Christian symbols from their living rooms, and 453 hung portraits of the Communist leader, according to SCMP.

The efforts were part of a government campaign to alleviate poverty in the region, since some CPC members believe families’ faith is to blame for their financial woes, according to SCMP. The poster swaps in villagers’ homes represent the party’s desire to have residents look to their leaders, rather than their Savior, for assistance.”

4. A thoughtful piece by Scott Sauls at The Gospel Coalition making the case that Christians should work to become the loving minority.

“If you’re a Christian leader, boss, or influencer, a time may come when your faith is costly to you and also to those you lead and serve. A time may come when certain organizations get put out of business because faithful Christianity becomes incompatible with the dogma, moral vision, and laws of the land. A time may come when religious freedom gives way to religious persecution for those who stand firm in their commitment to be disciples of Jesus versus disciples of prevailing culture.

Perhaps what was true of Christians in ancient Rome, and what is still true of Christians in other parts of the world today, will also become true of us—losing our livelihoods, our friends, our families, and even our own lives for Jesus’s sake.

Even if these things do occur in our lifetimes, it shouldn’t come as a shock. Jesus said that, in this world, we will have trouble and that people will hate his followers because of him. Jesus said that anyone who remains loyal to him will be persecuted and have false things said about them. He said that if we want to be his followers, we’ll have to deny ourselves daily, take up a cross, and follow him.”

5. An engaging essay by Ben Myers of Oklahoma Baptist University on the basis for making a "Great Books" curriculum a focal point for higher education.

“In short, the main reason Western civilization, with an emphasis on “Great Books,” deserves a prominent—indeed, the prominent—place in the curriculum of the Christian university is stewardship. We have inherited a garden full of wisdom—and a few thorns—and it is incumbent upon us to maintain and cultivate it for the wisdom, even if we must warn visitors to be careful of the thorns. Following in the footsteps of the ancients, medieval Christian philosophers identified three “transcendentals” that point us toward God: the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. We study the history and literature of Western civilization in order to see these transcendentals at play in our own cultural heritage; to appreciate the ways in which those who came before us have striven for the True, the Good, and the Beautiful; and to better understand how that quest for transcendence has been limited and impinged upon by sin and the reality of a fallen world. We study Western civilization because there is much in it that is edifying and because there is much in it that is tragic. This study is how we lay claim to our rightful inheritance of wisdom, nobility, and gracefulness. Through study, we become stewards of our culture.”