Worth Reading - 1/30

This post of links worth reading focuses on the ongoing epistemological crisis of our day, particularly from the angle of a conservative Christian.

1. Trevin Wax makes a case that Christians are especially vulnerable to misinformation that supports their prior assumptions. He also argues we are called to be more vigilant than others to avoid spreading untruth and risking the credibility of the gospel.

Conservative Christians have a right to be skeptical when it comes to mainstream media bias. But we are way too skeptical if we distrust any fact or figure from any mainstream site. And we are much too gullible if we easily believe stories that come from other sources, including the new administration.

Too many Christians these days are “gullible skeptics.” Skeptics toward establishment type media outlets, and gullible toward other websites or toward political spinmeisters who already line up with their preexisting beliefs or worldview.

What’s the point in chiding the abortion industry for championing false, but “useful” numbers regarding abortion deaths in the 1960’s if we are just as guilty for spreading misinformation because we find it useful or beneficial to our party?

2. At First Things, George Weigel goes after the idea that non-logical formulations can be supported from a theological perspective.  We cannot play fast and loose with the truth, or the logic behind the truth.

As for theology, the word means speaking-of-God, which in Christian terms means speaking of the One who is Truth—the Truth Who makes us free in the deepest meaning of human liberation. There are many ways of doing theology, and not all of them are strictly syllogistic; St. Ephrem the Syrian and St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Doctors of the Church, were not logicians. But if theology decays into illogical forms of Newspeak, it is false to itself.

It was providential that Christianity had its first “inculturation” in a milieu—Greco-Roman antiquity—where the principle of non-contradiction was well-established and something couldn’t “be” and “not be” simultaneously. That cultural environment was where Christianity found the conceptual tools to turn confession and proclamation—“Jesus is Lord”—into catechesis and Creed. Suppose the first “inculturation” had been in a setting where it made perfect sense to say “Jesus is Lord” and “Jesus is not Lord” at the same time—like the culture of India two millennia ago? It made a great deal of difference that the first formative centuries of Christianity took place in a culture where 2 + 2 always equaled 4.

3. At the Reformed African American Network, Jarvis Williams argues that racialized lenses for sifting through public facts often lead to justification of continued racial inequities. There is an epistemological problem in the justification of developing policies without engaging all the stakeholders. If we don't question our own biases, we can wind up with our own "alternative facts." 

If those with privilege in government can socially mobilize themselves in ways that enable them to avoid or blind themselves to racialization and the policies and laws emerging from racialization, they might be tempted to ignore or simply find evidence that will reinforce their biases against certain races.

We see this being played out already when people advocate for colorblindness to perpetuate racial injustice, point out that black on black crime is high to refute arguments on the presence of systemic injustice, and when folks assert all lives matter in response to the phrase black lives matter to challenge whether people have reason to believe systemic racism still exists in certain parts of our country.

“Alternative Facts” is not the phrase I would use to offer a counter argument against an opposing interpretation of shared evidence. Still, we must remember facts must be interpreted. All facts are interpreted facts. Sometimes we present evidence as factual, but it is later proven to be fiction. Any piece of evidence may be proven to be factual by one interpreter apart from another interpreter’s personal experience of that evidence, but no interpreter will ever personally know any piece of evidence as a fact unless one personally encounters and interprets it as a fact.

4. Ed Stetzer, writing for Christianity Today, argues that the Trump administration's loose grip of facts is raising concerns for the commitment to truth among Christians. We need to be, above all, people committed to truth.

What matters to me most, however, is that this is also a Christian problem, because Christians have gullibly consumed much of the fake news out there. And when Christians believe fake news, it makes us all look stupid—and causes Christianity itself to look foolish.

And the issues do relate. You see, at the moment, Sean Spicer looks a bit like Baghdad Bob. But this fake news is not a new thing. We’ve seen it before. We’ve seen it often in this election season, and far too often from self-identified Christians.
Christians have been sharing a lot of fake news. I’ve had Christians post on my Facebook page about #pizzagate, Obama’s birth certificate, and so much more. And I’m embarrassed that these fake facts are being shared by people I love—my brothers and sisters in Christ.

5. Aaron Earls tackles the "whirlwind of alternative facts" again commending Christians to remain faithful to the concept of truth. The cultural left has opened the gates to rejecting truth, but the cultural right should resist the urge to use that bad epistemology to gain and excercise power.

Those who previously spoke against the side effects of a postmodern attitude toward truth have seen how useful it is once you obtain power. Replacing absolute truth with a convenient truth is effective in dismissing criticism.

But eventually they will learn, as the left is learning now, that usefulness is only temporary. Eventually, the other side takes power and turns the tables.

More importantly, you lose any concept of truth and any sense of honesty. And our society cannot survive without without those.

We desperately need people who will embrace and defend truth no matter if it benefits them or not. That should fall to the Christian.

Those of us who follow Christ must never relinquish the idea of truth. Jesus called Himself the Truth. Scripture claims to be true and accurate.

We must not undercut our faith to inflate our politics or secure our power. Christians must be the ones who stand for truth regardless of who’s in power or what culture advocates.

Truth exists; it is not subjective. Facts are real; there is no alternative. For the Christian, there can be no other way.

Worth Reading - 1/21

1. It's that time of year again when the latest statistics about how rich the rich are and how poor the poor are. The intent of these statistics is to try to encourage forceful economic redistribution. Joe Carter at the Acton Institute explains why this statistic doesn't really help us understand wealth and poverty.

The problems with using this type of metric is that the comparisons are based on net worth (assets minus liabilities). Everyone who owns even a modest home and car and is not in debt would be in the top 10 percent. But it doesn’t really even take that much money to be in the top 50 percent.

In fact, if you aggregate all the people who have a negative net worth into one category and call them the “bottom half” then you come up with some peculiar conclusions. As Felix Salmon says, “My niece, who just got her first 50 cents in pocket money, has more money than the poorest 2 billion people in the world combined.”

But that “bottom half” (over 2 billion people) would include people like Eike Batista. Although he was the world’s eighth-richest person in March 2012, he now has a negative net worth of hundreds of millions of dollars. That puts him in the same category as people who live on less than a dollar a day. Is Salmon’s niece (or your own child) “richer” than Batista? Not in way we usually think of wealth: as the ability (or potential ability) to consume goods and services.

2. Scott Sauls recently published a piece on his blog the frames the discussion of the place of wealth in a better context. This is worth a read for those trying to figure out why Scripture doesn't condemn money totally.

Those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. (1 Timothy 6:8-10)

No one can serve two masters…you cannot serve God and money. (Mark 10:21)

Jesus told the rich young ruler, who was enamored with his wealth, that he would not be able to enter life until he sold everything and gave it to the poor.

Why would Jesus tell the rich ruler give everything to the poor, but not demand the same of Abraham or Job? It was because the rich ruler didn’t really have money. Money had him. The man who thought he couldn’t live without his money, in truth, wouldn’t be able to live with it.

Scripture never says that having wealth is wrong, but craving and serving wealth is the problem. It never says that money is a root of all kinds of evils, but that the love of money is the real issue.

3. An article from NPR that evaluates the concept of "free" college. Surprisingly, they are willing to note that state funding of higher education isn't really free. This is a relatively balanced piece that puts the arguments of the left and right in a fair light. Worth reading, since the idea of free education keeps getting thrown about.

“Free” is a word with a powerful appeal. And in the past year or so it has been tossed around a lot, followed by another word: “college.”

Both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton spent a lot of time talking about free tuition. And this week, the promise has been taken up by one of the largest public university systems in the country: New York state’s.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo unveiled a proposal that would offer free tuition at state-run colleges for students from families earning less than $125,000 a year. Called the Excelsior Scholarship, his plan — which needs approval by the Legislature — would grant full rides to qualifying students as long as they attend one of the state’s public two- or four-year colleges.

4. Some people like to argue that they are truly rational and enlightened because they believe everything scientifically. However, what if these people who believe Science provides the ultimate Truth are wrong about the nature of Science? That is the argument of this article:

Look, science is really important. And yet, who among us can easily provide a clear definition of the word “science” that matches the way people employ the term in everyday life?

So let me explain what science actually is. Science is the process through which we derive reliable predictive rules through controlled experimentation. That’s the science that gives us airplanes and flu vaccines and the Internet. But what almost everyone means when he or she says “science” is something different.

5. Trevin Wax encourages his readers to dive into the Bible and learn to swim.

We shouldn’t approach the Bible like it’s a sunken ship, where we dive deep for an artifact or treasure we can bring back to our own world. Instead, we should see our era like the sunken ship and the Bible as the ocean that surrounds us. Christians must learn how to swim in the Bible.

No one should say this is easy. It’s true that the Bible can feel to the newcomer as if it were a foreign land. The tourist may feel disoriented when visiting another country, where the language is different, where the signs are a mystery, and where the customs are unusual.

But the best way to learn a language or adapt to another culture is full immersion into its rituals, routines, and language. That’s why we need full immersion into the world of the Scripture: its message must be celebrated and proclaimed in communities of faith, its stories must be told as our own, and its characters must feel as close as family.

Worth Reading - 1/14

1. From Smithsonian Magazine, some new archaeological finds are changing our understanding of ancient Greek civilizations and the roots of Western culture.

In other words, it isn’t the Mycenaeans or the Minoans to whom we can trace our cultural heritage since 1450 B.C., but rather a blending of the two.

The fruits of that intermingling may have shaped the culture of classical Greece and beyond. In Greek mythology, for example, the legendary birthplace of Zeus is said to be a cave in the Dicte mountains on Crete, which may derive from a story about a local deity worshiped at Knossos. And several scholars have argued that the very notion of a Mycenaean king, known as a wanax, was inherited from Crete. Whereas the Near East featured autocratic kings—the Egyptian pharaoh, for example, whose supposed divine nature set him apart from earthly citizens—the wanax, says Davis, was the “highest-ranking member of a ranked society,” and different regions were served by different leaders. It’s possible, Davis proposes, that the transfer to Greek culture of this more diffuse, egalitarian model of authority was of fundamental importance for the development of representative government in Athens a thousand years later. “Way back in the Bronze Age,” he says, “maybe we’re already seeing the seeds of a system which ultimately allows for the emergence of democracies.”

2. I've never gotten a ticket from one, but I've often wondered if those red light cameras are constitutional. This interesting article at Public Discourse argues not and recounts one law professor's work to undermine his own prosecution for a ticket issued for someone else driving his vehicle.

Traffic-camera laws seem like such minor, insignificant intrusions on liberty that few grasp their constitutional significance. But they reflect a profoundly mistaken view of American constitutionalism. One might say that the traffic camera is a sign of our times. Its widespread use and acceptance reveals how far we have drifted from our fundamental commitment to self-government. When our governing officials dismiss due process as mere semantics, when they exercise powers they don’t have and ignore duties they actually bear, and when we let them get away with it, we have ceased to be our own rulers.

3. The prosperity gospel is in the news again with Paula White, a leading prosperity preacher, praying at the upcoming US Presidential Inauguration. This article gives some basic reasons why we should avoid the prosperity gospel.

Even if we avoid the more obvious versions of the prosperity gospel in our lives, it is easy to fall prey to the same error in a different key.

A soft prosperity gospel is a temptation for many Christians in the United States. We believe that if we pray over our proposal at work, our boss will be more likely to grant it. It’s easy to equate a bullish stock market with God’s goodness as our retirement portfolio climbs. When we get laid off from our steady employment, it’s easy to wonder if being a more faithful Christian might have prevented that personal tragedy.

4. Aaron Earls takes on the hype-machine Colin Cowherd (whose voice consistently made me change the channel whenever I listened to sports radio) in his rebuttal to Dabo Swinney. The interesting thing is that Cowherd's act as a blowhard sells and people are buying it. Earls asks if that is the right thing.

We need the cold shower of the truth to wake us up from the slumber brought on by cozy hot takes.

In the story of the boy who cried wolf, he was the only one who suffered for his dishonesty. That will not be the case for us, when our entire culture trades truth for passion and honesty for entertainment.

When everyone is constantly crying wolf to get attention, no one notices the wolves casually strolling around. And the most dangerous thing is, as Cowherd demonstrates, no one seems to care.

5. I wrote a post at the B&H Academic blog on the relationship between Ethics and Theology. My argument, using Dorothy L. Sayers for support, is that Ethics begins from a foundation of right doctrine:

Doctrine is the very heart of ethics. Unless you believe the right things, there is little hope that you will do the right things. If someone does not believe that humans have inherent value, they are unlikely seek to relieve their suffering or may justify doing harm while calling it good. Proper concern for the wellbeing of other humans is not self-generated; it arises from an anthropology that values people as made in the image of God. When anthropology fails, so does true compassion for other humans.

For example, movements that advocate for voluntary euthanasia are often couched in terms of individual autonomy and alleviation of suffering. Assisting in the suicide deaths of the old and the infirm is ethical if your anthropology presumes that humans have a right to self-determination and that human suffering is purposeless. A deep theological sentiment lies behind a pro-euthanasia ethic. Ethics springs from a foundation of those doctrines that are believed.

Worth Reading - 1/6

1. The top books of 2016 lists are coming out, based on sales. Of course, sales these days are often driven by algorithms related to popularity than reflections of the careful curation of booksellers and librarians. Writer, Seth Godin, commends resistance to anti-intellectualism and those who care about the good, true, and beautiful using their influence to resist click-bait and encourage quality entertainment.

Is it possible we’ve made things simpler than they ought to be, and established non-curiosity as the new standard?

We are certainly guilty of being active participants in a media landscape that breaks Einstein’s simplicity law every day. And having gotten away with it so far, we’re now considering removing the law from our memory.

The economics seem to be that the only way to make a living is to reach a lot of people and the only way to reach a lot of people is to race to the bottom, seek out quick clicks, make it easy to swallow, reinforce existing beliefs, keep it short, make it sort of fun, or prurient, or urgent, and most of all, dumb it down.

And that’s the true danger of anti-intellectualism. While it’s foolish to choose to be stupid, it’s cultural suicide to decide that insights, theories and truth don’t actually matter. If we don’t care to learn more, we won’t spend time or resources on knowledge.

We can survive if we eat candy for an entire day, but if we put the greenmarkets out of business along the way, all that’s left is candy.

Give your kid a tablet, a game, and some chicken fingers for dinner. It’s easier than talking to him.

Read the short articles, the ones with pictures, it’s simpler than digging deep.

Clickbait works for a reason. Because people click on it.

The thing about clickbait, though, is that it exists to catch prey, not to inform them. It’s bait, after all.

2. Reformed African American Network posted this solid discussion of "sola scriptura," one of the central tenets of the Reformation. It's worth reading as it clearly explains an oft misunderstood pillar of Protestant Christianity:

As we find ourselves at the beginning of a new year, it is an excellent time to look back to revisit some foundational truths that will keep us on the proper course as we plot our way forward. I’d like us to briefly look back on the Protestant Reformation.

The Reformation was one of the most pivotal moments in the history of the Church. I don’t have the space in this post to give you a detailed historical account, but what I can tell you is that it marked a radical return to the authority of the Scriptures and sound doctrine. The Church had become corrupted by false teaching, idolatry, and the exaltation of the traditions of men over the commandments of God.

The Protestant Reformation was not a rebellious reach forward to capture some new understanding or revelation. It was a humble, courageous return to the foundation of the Christian faith. Out of the Reformation came the five “solas”. One of the five “solas” was Sola Scriptura or Scripture alone.

3. I enjoyed this piece by Mary Pezzulo of Steel Magnificat on why she has come to dislike the Bearenstain Bears stories so much:

Worse even than my thwarted expectations, though, is the way my opinion has changed about the character of Mama Bear. As a child, I accepted her eccentricities; now they seem more sinister. It’s no longer cute to me that Mama Bear never takes off her grubby nightgown. She changes out of her nightcap when going to town, but she wears the nightgown at all times. And that’s not to mention her pathological habit of baking tray after tray of toothsome cookies and then blaming the children for their obesity, or permitting the television to be on for hours and then blaming the children for their TV habit.

It’s downright creepy how the whole household abides by Mama Bear’s wishes. She orders them to fast from television for a week, and everyone including Papa Bear is forced to comply. She writes up a chore chart and expects her husband to abide by it– and he does. He always does. She decides on a whim to open up a quilt shop one day, obtaining the money for the investment from Lord knows where, and Papa Bear mutely takes over childcare. No family decisions are made with his input; he’s treated as a chattel. I wonder what would happen if he said no, just once.

4. What do you do when an algorithm defies your best judgment? You cheat. That's what some librarians are having to do in opposition to software that culls books from libraries based on their circulation. As a result, some have resorted to creating a fake user account to check books out and trick the software into keeping important, though less used volumes.

Two employees at the East Lake County Library created a fictional patron called Chuck Finley — entering fake driver’s license and address details into the library system — and then used the account to check out 2,361 books over nine months in 2016, in order to trick the system into believing that the books they loved were being circulated to the library’s patrons, thus rescuing the books from automated purges of low-popularity titles.

Library branch supervisor George Dore was suspended for his role in the episode; he said that he was trying to game the algorithm because he knew that these books would come back into vogue and that his library would have to spend extra money re-purchasing them later. He said that other libraries were doing the same thing.

5. This one is worth reading simply for the strangeness.  A Good Housekeeping article on the growing trend of people marrying themselves. Read it and be amazed at the illogic.

Self-marriage is a small but growing movement, with consultants and self-wedding planners popping up across the world. In Canada, a service called Marry Yourself Vancouver launched this past summer, offering consulting services and wedding photography. In Japan, a travel agency called Cerca Travel offers a two-day self-wedding package in Kyoto: You can choose a wedding gown, bouquet, and hairstyle, and pose for formal wedding portraits. On the website I Married Me, you can buy a DIY marriage kit: For $50, you get a sterling silver ring, ceremony instructions, vows, and 24 “affirmation cards” to remind you of your vows over time. For $230, you can get the kit with a 14-karat gold ring.

It’s not a legal process — you won’t get any tax breaks for marrying yourself. It’s more a “rebuke” of tradition, says Rebecca Traister, author of All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation. “For generations, if women wanted to have economic stability and a socially sanctioned sex life or children, there was enormous social and economic pressure to do that within marriage,” she says. “Personally, as someone who lived for many years single and then did get married, I know that the kind of affirmation I got for getting married was unlike anything I’d ever had in any other part of my life.” That, she adds, is “incredibly unjust.”

Marriage (to another person) is on the decline. Barely half of all adults in the U.S. are married — a record low — according to a 2011 study from the Pew Research Center. In 1960, 72% of adults age 18 and older were married, while today, just 51% are wed. People are waiting longer to marry as well: The median age at first marriage is at a new high for brides (26.5 years) and grooms (28.7 years).

Worth Reading - 12/27

1. A report from The Atlantic on an experiment in the UK teaching school children elements of philosophy. By helping children to learn to think more clearly, the program shows some benefits in learning unrelated to the philosophical ideas taught. In other words, by learning about truth, kids were better able to read and do math. Though this is far from conclusive, it does give some support to the school of thought that teaching kids to think is more important than teaching them information.

More than 3,000 kids in 48 schools across England participated in weekly discussions about concepts such as truth, justice, friendship, and knowledge, with time carved out for silent reflection, question making, question airing, and building on one another’s thoughts and ideas.
Kids who took the course increased math and reading scores by the equivalent of two extra months of teaching, even though the course was not designed to improve literacy or numeracy. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds saw an even bigger leap in performance: reading skills increased by four months, math by three months, and writing by two months. Teachers also reported a beneficial impact on students’ confidence and ability to listen to others.

2. $25 isn't a lot of money, unless you are poor. A fee, small to many working professionals, for being arrested doesn't sound like an undue burden unless that fee is charged simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some municipalities are raising funds by charging fees for court costs. This becomes unfair, however, when these costs are incurred whether the individual is charged or not, or even culpable. This is an injustice.

Corey Statham had $46 in his pockets when he was arrested in Ramsey County, Minn., and charged with disorderly conduct. He was released two days later, and the charges were dismissed.

But the county kept $25 of Mr. Statham’s money as a “booking fee.” It returned the remaining $21 on a debit card subject to an array of fees. In the end, it cost Mr. Statham $7.25 to withdraw what was left of his money.

The Supreme Court will soon consider whether to hear Mr. Statham’s challenge to Ramsey County’s fund-raising efforts, which are part of a national trend to extract fees and fines from people who find themselves enmeshed in the criminal justice system.

3. A well-wrought "think piece" on fake news and why resisting it (and avoiding spreading it) is so important, particularly for Christians. This article from the ERLC is well worth a read/

More than any other reason, fake news has dominated the cultural conversation recently because of the unexpected results of November’s presidential election. Most major media outlets wrongly forecasted the election’s outcome. The President-elect’s surprise victory sent shockwaves through the media, leaving journalists and pundits desperate to explain how the consensus opinion could be so far off target.

In order to explain the results, many have pointed to the fake news articles that have recently become fixtures of social media networks like Facebook and Twitter. These articles and websites are usually easy to identify. They employ outlandish or incendiary headlines that link to articles based on only the smallest sliver of facts. In some cases, the articles are outright fabrications, based on no truth at all. These fake news sites are nothing more than “click-bait” and in fairness, there are numerous right-wing versions of these articles and websites.

However, fake news is nonpartisan. It comes from the left and the right, and it can hardly explain the results of the election. In fact, in only a few weeks’ time, the term has become hyper-politicized, taking on the meaning “any news one disagrees with.” But all of this obscures the point. Fake news is a real thing. It exists to exploit people. It preys on ignorance, prejudice and biases.

4. One of the great movies of my childhood, which my wife will not allow me to watch with the kids for some reason, is Home Alone. This article is, just for fun, a medical professional's diagnosis of the trauma Kevin induced on the Wet Bandits, which may have been a little in excess of necessary force.

Since its debut in 1990, Home Alone has become as much a part of the Christmas cinematic ritual as It’s a Wonderful Life. But unlike that uplifting tale about the good of mankind, Home Alone tells a rather unsettling Christmas story of a precocious 8-year-old who, accidentally abandoned by his family, is forced to defend his home from two dimwitted burglars. Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) turns his family’s home into a veritable funhouse of torturous booby traps that so-called Wet Bandits Marv (Daniel Stern) and Harry (Joe Pesci) hilariously stumble through, and the transformation of a suburban Chicago home into a relentless injury machine is nothing short of spectacular. But it does require quite a suspension of disbelief. Can a man really be hit square in the face with a steam iron and walk away unfazed? What kind of permanent physical damage would a blow torch to the head really do? To answer these questions and officially dissolve Home Alone’s Hollywood magic, I spoke with my friend Dr. Ryan St. Clair of the Weill Cornell Medical College. Enjoy.
But let’s properly define the problem. History and experience tell me it’s not a post-truth era: Facts have always been hard to separate from falsehoods, and political partisans have always made it harder. It’s better to call this a post-trust era.

Business, government, churches and the media have fallen in public esteem. These institutions paid a price for an entire generation of wars, scandals, economic convulsions and cynical politics. We’re left with fewer traditional guideposts for whom to believe. The spread of fake news from fraudulent sources is only a symptom: The larger problem is that many Americans doubt what governments or authorities tell them, and also dismiss real news from traditional sources.

Worth Reading - 12/17

1. Russell Moore affirms the cosmic importance of Sunday School. It's something we often take for granted, but his account reflects the importance of investing time and resources into kids on a weekly basis.

I’ve often said that I wouldn’t want to have to choose between my seminary education and my childhood years in Sunday school, but if forced I would choose Sunday School each time. Now that’s saying something since I believe so strongly in seminary education, and gave most of my ministry to it. I’d never want to give that up. But as important as theological education was for me, Sunday school was more so.

There was nothing about my Sunday school experience that would be commended by a seminar on children’s development or Bible teaching. My teachers weren’t theologically trained, and probably not one of them could have explained the hypostatic union or the Pauline doctrine of election. They also weren’t pedagogically equipped. Some just had us go around the room taking turns reading, monotone, from the curriculum shipped from the denominational publishing house. Sometimes the biblical text was incomprehensible to us, since we were, at the time, a King James Version-only church (not out of some theological conviction but because we didn’t know about other translations).

2. Trevin Wax finished his PhD about a year ago. This brief post documents some of the considerations he would have looking back on starting the program. I think it's a pretty good summary of what folks should consider.

The one thing I wish I’d known before I started is just how much of a spiritual battle would be involved in pursuing the PhD. There are devilish traps everywhere. From the idea that more knowledge equals more maturity in your faith, to the ease with which one can fall into pompousness and pretentiousness in writing and criticism. . . . Or the low points of mental exhaustion, where your head literally hurts from all the reading and writing you’ve done. . . . There is a spiritual dimension to that struggle that I wish I’d anticipated beforehand, so that I could have better fortified myself spiritually for that moment.

The evil twins of pride and despair show up frequently, either causing you to throw your hands up and say, “This is terrible, and so am I” or to burst with excitement because you think, “This is amazing, and so am I.” The line between taking pride in your work or in yourself is thin. The ease with which we forget what a massive privilege it is to study truth in an institution of higher learning (and the stewardship we exercise in that situation) still haunts me. We so easily forget the spiritual identity we have received when we focus on the intellectual title we want to earn.

3. This video documentary highlights the strategy of Richard Spencer, a popular figure in the Alt-Right movement, to normalize White Nationalism. The video is presented without commentary or narration, but it reveals how a particular identity group is borrowing tactics from hard left identity groups (some of which are now considered mainstream) to normalize their activities. We need to be aware as media consumers.

4. Tim Keller is always worth listening to, reading, or watching. This podcast with the Mere Fidelity crew is fun, delightful, and informative. Well worth your time.

5. The horror of Aleppo is significant. Somehow we have lost track of it (it seems) because of our distraction with internal politics, but our proper reaction should be horror and sympathy, as Richard Stearns argues at the ERLC.

And it seems we’ve lost the capacity for outrage over what’s happening to innocent people in places like Syria and Iraq. In between spikes of interest like 3-year-old Alan Kurdi’s body on the beach; 5-year-old Omran Daqneesh’s vacant stare after being pulled from the rubble; and now the heart-wrenching goodbye videos from people trapped in Aleppo, we revert to complacency.

How do we keep our hearts tender for the suffering in our world? How do we see as God sees, care as he cares, love as he loves?

Most Christians have heard the powerful prayer of World Vision’s founder, Bob Pierce: “Let my heart be broken by the things that break the heart of God.” I suspect it was as much a prayer for himself as for others. A broken heart can be healed, and Bob wanted his to stay broken, to keep him in the place God wanted him to be: absolutely intolerant of a child’s pain.

We need to do the same if we want to be used by God in these situations. We have to let suffering into our hearts. Other people’s pain should touch us deeply and set off our rage and move us to action.

Worth Reading - 12/10

1. The media has a strong liberal bias. That isn't the same as fake news. Evangelicals, even the ones that go to church regularly and are actually regenerate, are more prone to fall for fake news than others. They are also more likely to rail against the media. Sometimes it is deserved, but that criticism often goes overboard. Sarah Pulliam Bailey has written a good analysis of this phenomenon in the Washington Post.

I was raised in both a religious home and a newspaper home. My parents would pull out books for Bible study in the morning and plop them next to the local newspaper. The Bible and newspaper went together like cereal and milk. I grew up believing journalism was a noble profession because the best journalism is based on the relentless pursuit of truth.

Your quick dismissal of the entire “mainstream media” feels deeply inaccurate to me as a Christian and a journalist — at least the kind of Christianity I was raised on, where the newspaper informed how we understood the world. The act of doing journalism is a way to live out my faith, a way to search for and then reveal truth in the world around me.

2. Another Christian woman who blogs about motherhood lifestyle issues has denied biblical doctrine on human sexuality in order to "live out her truth." Jen Pollock Michel argues that living out your own self determined truth isn't really enough for a faithful Christian.

But the seismic nature of Melton’s recent revelation and the aftershocks felt by her adoring fans suggests that the sky might be falling in some new way. Because while the self-fulfillment narrative isn’t new, here’s what is: how easily and insidiously it gets baptized as a Christian story. Melton hasn’t simply said: I should be happy. She has emphatically said: God should be equally and unequivocally committed to my happiness as I am.

Melton’s moral ethos is not what John Stuart Mill described in his 1859 On Liberty: “Pagan self-assertion is better than Christian self-denial.” Unapologetically, she has taken up the cause of Christian self-assertion. Take for example how Melton pleads with blog readers, as they absorb the news of her divorce, to “think deeply about the chasm-wide difference between leaving a man and leaving God. Please remember that when a woman leaves, she just brings God with her. Nothing separates a woman or a family from God’s love. Not death, and certainly not divorce.” As if she has exposited Romans 8, Melton sermonizes that God’s love is so boundless that her choices need no bounds. (It’s worth noting, by the way, that in The Good Life Project, Melton called her readers “congregants” and also likened her writing to the acts of the early church.)

3. We hear about public Christians that fall, but we rarely hear about them coming back. This interview (and the accompanying podcast) about William "Duce" Branch, aka The Ambassador, covers his road back from a moral failure. It's worth reading and listening to.

Ask any number of emerging Christian rappers or urban church leaders about the voices they grew up listening to, and before long, you’ll start to notice a trend: They’re likely to name William “Duce” Branch, also known as “The Ambassador,” among their influences. As a founding member of hip-hop group The Cross Movement, Branch and his fellow artists helped to blaze a trail for Christian hip-hop in the ‘90s and ‘00s, producing groundbreaking, theologically rich tracks at a time when gangsta rap was still at the height of mainstream popularity.

Branch has also served as a minister—though, as he readily admits, he had a “fall” when he became involved in an inappropriate relationship with a member of his church. The consequences of his failure were hard and alienating, but as he’s grown past it, he’s learned a lot about the value of honesty and God’s unflinching redemption.

4. This anonymous post was a fun read over at Mere Orthodoxy. It's a spoof on the think-pieces on Saint Nicholas as heretic puncher or excessively violent. Both the celebration of and criticism of Saint Nicholas (even if the account of him punching Arius is true, which it probably isn't) are both overboard.

Nicholas’s famous generosity often had a darker edge to it. His giving was frequently tied to expectations of sexual purity and even forced marriages. To take only one example, Nicholas supposedly once “helped” three young women who would have been forced into prostitution by tossing three bags of gold through their bedroom window to provide wedding dowries for them. Given the realities of marriage in such a world, however, Nicholas simply allowed these women to move from formal prostitution toward a way of life often no less violent and horrifying for women. His attitude toward women may have stemmed from a deep-seated embarrassment at needing the help of a woman, Mary the mother of Jesus, to get him reinstated to his bishopric after Constantine rightly stripped him of his titles after the incident with Arius.

5. This sermon from May of 2015 is a good message to call pastors and leaders back to proper biblical exposition.

Worth Reading - 12/3

1. Bethany Jenkins has published a very interesting article about a Christian serving in the US Mint who transformed the culture of the mint by recognizing people's God-given worth. It's a helpful story and may be an aid to those seeking to bring their Christianity to bear on all of life.

Christians have such a narrative and purpose. We know that Jesus became incarnate, taking on the daily ordinariness of humanity and enduring the cross. Paul, too, was beaten, lashed, and shipwrecked (2 Cor. 11:16–33). Yet these men had a greater narrative in mind than their own personal comfort. They endured because they connected their work to the ultimate narrative—that God sent Jesus to his people to reconcile them to God.

And our narrative includes even more than evangelism, more than spreading the good news of God’s reconciling message. As disciples, we’re called to live our whole lives—from family to church to volunteer activities to “whatever you do” before the face of God and for his glory (Col. 3:17; cf. 1 Cor. 10:31).

And that includes our vocations. Our ordinary, everyday work points to that larger narrative. Though we only see small glimpses of glory in this life, we’ll see the whole panorama in heaven. Since the resurrection is true, and the perishable will put on the imperishable, Paul can write: “Be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain” (1 Cor. 15:58).

2. Penn and Teller are well known entertainers and well-spoken atheists. They have been entertaining people for decades and are, certainly, entertaining to watch. This article at Christ and Pop Culture talks about the wonder they bring to the stage and the enjoyment in their deception, despite their distinctly and vocally anti religious bent.

Magic tricks exist on the edge of human awareness and perception, and magicians are masters of manipulating your senses to ensure that you only see what they want you to see and only when they want you to see it. (The usually silent Teller has explained this approach in more detail.) As such, magic can be more than just mere entertainment. It can also be a great lesson in humility, in admitting your own limitations and ignorance—especially when you’re an aspiring practitioner of prestidigitation yourself.

Since we’ve started watching Fool Us, my family has become somewhat magic-obsessed; we’ve often tried to one-up each other with some magic trick we’ve read about or seen on YouTube. Mind you, we have no desire to start a Vegas act anytime soon, but learning even the basics of sleight of hand and card manipulation have given us a modicum of insight into how some potential foolers do their thing.

Interestingly enough, that hasn’t diminished our enjoyment of the acts that come on Fool Us; if anything, it makes us only appreciate more the amount of skill, talent, and excellence on display. Here, too, is cause for humility. While watching somebody like Michael Vincent perform, I understand some of the basic principles of sleight of hand at play—but that knowledge does absolutely nothing to diminish my appreciation and enjoyment of the level of sheer skill on display in Vincent’s enchanting routine.

3. Fred Sanders, an irenic theologian who specializes in the doctrine of the Trinity, has put fingers to keyboard to write an entertaining, humorous, but very critical review of a recent book that claims to be about the Trinity by a Franciscan priest named Richard Rohr. Sanders' essay is significant because he actually marks Rohr's redescription of the triune God as a divine flow as heretical. Coming from someone who is generally very soft-spoken, this is a significant critique. However, Rohr is a popular writer among the spiritual-but-not-religious crowd of Christians, which makes the critique of this book important.

Rohr is a bestselling author who enjoys great popularity on the spirituality scene. He has Oprah cred, a Bono blurb, and an alternative school in Albuquerque. He’s written a lot of other books (he refers helpfully to several of them in the footnotes of this one), and I have to admit I haven’t yet read any of them. I picked up The Divine Dance because it says it’s about the Trinity, and also because it seems likely to be influential in coming months. The book is endorsed by Shane Claiborne, Jim Wallis, Nadia Bolz-Weber, and Rob Bell. Weeks before it was even published, The Divine Dance was already the bestselling new release on the Trinity—indeed, the top seller in Amazon’s listing of newly released theology books, period.
Father Richard Rohr, in other words, has a thing going on. He has a signature style, a devoted fan base, and a certain something people expect him to bring to whatever topic he takes up. In The Divine Dance he takes up the Trinity.

Except he doesn’t. This book, The Divine Dance, is not about the Trinity.

What it’s about is the flow (see first paragraph above). What Rohr does in this book is teach about the Divine Flow, and he gets his message across by pressing into service some bits and pieces of Christian theological terminology. If that sounds perniciously subversive to you, there’s a reason. It’s perniciously subversive. In The Divine Dance, Rohr aggressively misappropriates Trinitarian language in order to commend his own eclectic spiritual teaching.

4. There is a big difference between racial bias (which everyone has) and white supremacy. However, in the ongoing identity wars, some on the left have taken to calling any form of bias white supremacy. The trouble is that a minor implicit bias is not the same degree a problem as actually cognitively believing one race is inferior to another. As a result, by trying to kill subliminal bias by classifying it as a horrendous evil (specifically white supremacy), the evil is getting watered down. It is a healthy thing that some on the left are beginning to recognize this, as can be witnessed in this article in Time magazine:

The term “dogwhistle” is even an example, in that we typically use it in reference to the right wing. However, white supremacy is now a dogwhistle itself. A leftist contingent is now charging any white person who seriously questions a position associated with people of color as a white supremacist. The idea is that if you go against a certain orthodoxy, then it isn’t only that you disagree, but that you also wish white people were still in charge, that you want people of color to sit down and shut up.

This is hasty and unfair. David Duke is, indeed, a white supremacist. The alt-right is, indeed, white supremacist. For one, they openly say so. Are there some whites who are more codedly white supremacist, even if they don’t quite know it? One assumes so—but the rhetorical brush is being applied much too broadly. After all, if whites accept anything a person of color states, is this not a new form of condescension? These days, the term “white supremacy” is being used not as an argument but as a weapon.

“White supremacist” is a new way of saying “racist” while stepping around the steadily increasing awareness that that word, too, is being wielded in sloppy ways. Writing “white supremacist” is a way of making the reader jump, in the way that “prejudiced” and “racist” once were. What handier way of driving your critique home than implying that your target would have broken bread with the Confederacy, stood at the school doors at the behest of Orville Faubus, or today would be happy to sip coffee at conferences with well-spoken alt-righters?

5. Adoption is an important ministry, but we shouldn't ignore the occasions when it goes really poorly. It doesn't always work out like Anne of Green Gables as this family's story shows. Worth a read, though it shouldn't discourage people from considering the ministry of adoption.

Our girl had a hard life before she came to us. A harder life in those 7 years before we knew her than most adults will experience in a lifetime. Her story is her story. It’s private and tender and it’s not mine to tell. The amount of abuse and rejection she has experienced brings me to my knees and it amazes me how she’s still standing at all.

Adoption is wrought with trauma. It’s not always the happy picture that gets shared from the pulpit on Sunday morning. Sometimes it is and that is glorious. We have one of those glorious adoption stories living in our home, too. But in many cases, adopted kids have been through hell. They’ve lost their mothers, their culture, their innocence. And while the world thinks that love will fix these kids and all will be rosy and smell like pine needles, the reality is sometimes very different. You don’t fix heartache that deep overnight with a new comforter and new brothers and sisters, a touch of therapy and tons of love. You don’t replace one mom with another. Or rip away years of hard history. Histories shape us, for better or for worse. Those hurts become the fabric of our stories, even when those stories are woven with love. So when your story doesn’t turn out like the happy ones from the pulpit, it’s easy to feel like you’ve failed.

6. It should come as little surprise, but casinos are geared to benefit the owners and operators. Whatever surface attempts they make at pacifying conscience they are providing assistance for those with addictions to gambling, they actually enable gambling and destroy the lives of many people who get sucked into their snare. This Atlantic article provides some context for the danger of casinos.

Stevens methodically concealed his addiction from his wife. He handled all the couple’s finances. He kept separate bank accounts. He used his work address for his gambling correspondence: W-2Gs (the IRS form used to report gambling winnings), wire transfers, casino mailings. Even his best friend and brother-in-law, Carl Nelson, who occasionally gambled alongside Stevens, had no inkling of his problem. “I was shocked when I found out afterwards,” he says. “There was a whole Scott I didn’t know.”

When Stevens ran out of money at the casino, he would leave, write a company check on one of the Berkman accounts for which he had check-cashing privileges, and return to the casino with more cash. He sometimes did this three or four times in a single day. His colleagues did not question his absences from the office, because his job involved overseeing various companies in different locations. By the time the firm detected irregularities and he admitted the extent of his embezzlement, Stevens—the likable, responsible, trustworthy company man—had stolen nearly $4 million.

7. This 3 minute video on the study and preservation of archaic Greek language is interesting for those of us who think languages are pretty cool.

Worth Reading - 11/18

1. A fun article about book curses. Because books used to be so expensive, people used to wish some pretty dire consequences on those that might steal or mutilate them.

In the Middle Ages, creating a book could take years. A scribe would bend over his copy table, illuminated only by natural light—candles were too big a risk to the books—and spend hours each day forming letters, by hand, careful never to make an error. To be a copyist, wrote one scribe, was painful: “It extinguishes the light from the eyes, it bends the back, it crushes the viscera and the ribs, it brings forth pain to the kidneys, and weariness to the whole body.”
Given the extreme effort that went into creating books, scribes and book owners had a real incentive to protect their work. They used the only power they had: words. At the beginning or the end of books, scribes and book owners would write dramatic curses threatening thieves with pain and suffering if they were to steal or damage these treasures.
They did not hesitate to use the worst punishments they knew—excommunication from the church and horrible, painful death. Steal a book, and you might be cleft by a demon sword, forced to sacrifice your hands, have your eyes gouged out, or end in the “fires of hell and brimstone.”

2. While some try to push religion entirely out of the public square, insisting that religious reasoning has no place in politics, Elizabeth Stoker Brunig went to the Yale Political Union to argue exactly the opposite. It is a speech that is certainly worth reading.

That religion has no place in government is both a positive and normative statement, by which I mean it can be read both ways: as either a statement of fact, that there simply is no place for religion in government; or as a statement with moral intention, that there ought to be no place for religion in government.
These two readings are related but not the same. They are related both because whether something is so is no argument for its being so, and because, things that are nonetheless often carry moral inertia, and justify themselves by their being. So it’s worthwhile to consider the two propositions apart.

3. Bethany Jenkins has written a spectacular piece on conforming to Scripture and not the wisdom of the world. The most important thing a Christian woman (or any Christian) can do is cling to God's truth and not allow it to be divorced from emotional intelligence.

But there is no peace in self-affirmation, since we’re not reliable sources. We’re fickle, vacillating daily between accusing and affirming ourselves. Our hearts are deceptive, seeking ways to embrace our selfish desires. Like Eve, we crave the words of the serpent: “Make yourself happy. Don’t worry about what anyone says. Do it your own way.”
We need someone—someone outside of us, someone who isn’t fickle or deceptive—to tell us who we are, what we need, and that we’re okay. In short, we need God. He is the only one who tells us that we’re far more broken than we think, but far more loved than we can imagine. His stamp of approval is the most affirming, since it is the most accurate.

4. There has been a pretty significant reaction since the Presidential election against identity politics. While there is danger that the reaction will go to far, this analysis presents a fair critique of the problem on the political and social left and why it left so many out of touch with the people on the right and in the middle.

But the fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life. At a very young age our children are being encouraged to talk about their individual identities, even before they have them. By the time they reach college many assume that diversity discourse exhausts political discourse, and have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good. In large part this is because of high school history curriculums, which anachronistically project the identity politics of today back onto the past, creating a distorted picture of the major forces and individuals that shaped our country. (The achievements of women’s rights movements, for instance, were real and important, but you cannot understand them if you do not first understand the founding fathers’ achievement in establishing a system of government based on the guarantee of rights.)

5. One of the toughest issues to discuss graciously as Christians is the issue of the morality of transgenderism. Here is a podcast with a qualified sexologist and later an interview with someone who identifies as transwoman while affirming her status as Christian. Even if you disagree with the analysis at the end of the day, this is a sensitive and honest conversation about an important topic.

Worth Reading - 9/25

Here are some links worth reading from the past week.

1. Thomas Kidd explains why the Bible clearly rejects the chattel, race-based slavery as it was seen in the United States.

It is hard to imagine a more challenging historical and scriptural topic than slavery. It has become ammunition used by skeptics who have denounced the Bible as fundamentally immoral. I believe that maturing Christians should grapple with these kinds of Bible "problems," instead of just assuming that the Scriptures give us transparent answers to all of life and history's conundrums.
Moreover, we can in fact make a powerful argument for how the Bible undercuts slavery, as it was typically practiced. But the argument requires more work, and more historical understanding, than the simplistic notion that the Bible is "against slavery."
Usually, when we think about the practice of slavery, we think of slaves working on a plantation. Fair enough. In antebellum America, slaves found themselves working in a variety of jobs, but agricultural labor was the most common. And when you focus on this kind of "slavery in the abstract," you have a tougher time making a Christian case that it was absolutely wrong.

2. Bruce Ashford discusses 12 ways to create a toxic political atmosphere. This is a tongue-in-cheek piece, but highlights some of the things that led us to our present climate.

  1. Treat the other as a category rather than a person. If this person is nothing more than a category—secular progressive, religious conservative, establishment lackey—then you are free to dismiss him as such. Just imagine that he is an aggregate of the common vices and errors you ascribe to people of that category. Then (“voila!” as they say) you are free to demean and degrade the person as if he were an impersonal collation of vices and errors. Vices don’t deserve your respect, and errors don’t require patience. Show neither.
  2. Refuse to listen attentively to the other. Instead of focusing on others and their words, make sure you focus on yourself. Control the conversation, shifting attention away from any good point the other might make. As they are engaging you in debate, try to pay minimal attention in the moment so that you can devote your attention to scoring debate points whenever their mouth finally closes. It’s about winning, isn’t it, folks? And nobody gets medals for listening.

3. Erick Erickson reconsiders his opposition to both Clinton and Trump. You need to read the full article to get the weight of it.

The polling has drawn ever closer. More and more people wonder if those of us who are NeverTrump should finally yield knowing that we can beat Hillary Clinton. I am in an odd position. I am mindful that should Trump win, the Republican establishment will blame people like me for giving rise to Trump. Likewise, I know if Trump loses, the Republican establishment will blame people like me for giving rise to Trump and Trump supporters will blame people like me for his loss. I suppose I should say not that I’m in an odd position, but that I am in a no-win position.
With Donald Trump’s rise in the polls and the increasingly competitive nature of the race, it is time to reconsider my opposition to Trump. After all, I view Hillary Clinton’s candidacy as anti-American.
I realize saying Hillary Clinton’s candidacy is, in my view, “anti-American” offends some or comes off as hyperbolic, but I think her candidacy is fundamentally anathema to and is fundamentally in opposition to basic, historic American values. I believe the founders of this country recognized individual liberty as negative liberty. It was not what individuals could do if government helped them that made this country great. Rather, it was what individuals could do if government left them alone.

4. Tim Challies on the unfortunate reality that women fear for their safety more than do men. We wish it was not so, but is is.

As dawn breaks I run across a lonely parking lot, cutting a long corner. As I pass a building, a depot of some kind, I spot a young woman walking. She must be going to the neighborhood I’ve come from. Our paths will cross. She’s eighteen, maybe nineteen. As I come closer her eyes search mine and ask, “Are you going to hurt me? Am I safe?” “Hurt you?” I hear my mind say. “I’m called to love, to love you more than I love myself. How could I ever hurt you?” I’m grieved that the world is this way, that the world has become this way. I smile what I hope is an assuring smile and nod as I pass by.
Pitch darkness lit only by sporadic street lights and occasional headlights. I run one of my new routes, down a brutal hill and back up, down and up again until I’m too tired to go on. A woman, in her fifties perhaps, is on the sidewalk ahead of me. I approach her, the hill’s steep grade propelling me almost to a sprint. She hears or senses me coming, she clutches something in her hand, her body tenses, flinches a little. I think, “I won’t harm you. I would never harm you. I live by an ethic that says that I need to be willing to die for you even though I don’t know you.” Between breaths I say, “Good morning!” as cheerfully as I can. I continue down the hill and by the time I loop back she is gone.

5. A podcast with Destin Sandlin from Smarter Everyday where he talks about being a father and why he is an internet creator.

Worth Reading - 9/18

1. This piece is near gold. Seven habits of highly depolarizing people. It's worth a read and application.

In recent decades, we Americans have become highly practiced in the skills and mental habits of demonizing our political opponents. All our instruments agree that we currently do political polarization very well, and researchers tell us that we’re getting better at it all the time.
For example, Stanford Professor Shanto Iyengar and his colleagues recently found that, when it comes both to trusting other people with your money and evaluating the scholarship applications of high school seniors, Americans today are less friendly to people in the other political party than we are to people of a different race. The researchers conclude that “Americans increasingly dislike people and groups on the other side of the political divide and face no social repercussions for the open expression of these attitudes.” As a result, today “the level of partisan animus in the American public exceeds racial animus.”1 That’s saying something!
But if polarization is all around us, familiar as an old coat, what about its opposite? What would depolarization look and sound like? Would we know it if we saw it, in others or in ourselves? Perhaps most importantly, what are the mental habits that encourage it?
We’re confronted with an irony here. We Americans didn’t necessarily think our way into political polarization, but we’ll likely have to think our way out. A number of big structural and social trends—including the end of the Cold War, the rising importance of cultural issues in our politics, growing secularization, greater racial and ethnic diversity, the shift from the Greatest Generation to Baby Boomers as the nation’s dominant elites, the break-up of the old media system, the increasing ideological coherence of both of our two main political parties, among others—appear to have helped produce our current predicament.

2. Missionary Nik Ripken writes to ask what is wrong with Western missionaries.

We had already learned how important it was to listen. So we set aside time to listen to the believing culture inside a Muslim country, in rural and urban locations, among both young and old, both men and women, and those literate as well as oral communicators. They told us how they had heard of Jesus and his Bible for the first time. We were startled to discover that their experience was quite different from the experiences of most of the rest of the believing world.
In our earlier travels, we had learned that much persecution originates within governments and institutions of power. In the U.S.S.R. and China persecution was institutionalized. Persecutors were typically somewhere “out there,” and they employed means to find, punish, incarcerate, and kill believers.

3. PBS covers a school that has converted its football stadium into an organic garden. The students can work off their tuition by working in the garden.

HARI SREENIVASAN: He turned the football field into an organic farm that generates more than 20,000 pounds of organic vegetables every year, veggies that make it into high-end restaurants and into the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium.
MICHAEL SORRELL: I think this has saved our school. It saved it because it changed the narrative of the institution.

4. The story of a man who rejected Christianity, but came to recognize that his rejection of a version of Christianity was based on very Christian grounds.

“We preach Christ crucified,” St Paul declared, “unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness.” He was right. Nothing could have run more counter to the most profoundly held assumptions of Paul’s contemporaries – Jews, or Greeks, or Romans. The notion that a god might have suffered torture and death on a cross was so shocking as to appear repulsive. Familiarity with the biblical narrative of the Crucifixion has dulled our sense of just how completely novel a deity Christ was. In the ancient world, it was the role of gods who laid claim to ruling the universe to uphold its order by inflicting punishment – not to suffer it themselves.
Today, even as belief in God fades across the West, the countries that were once collectively known as Christendom continue to bear the stamp of the two-millennia-old revolution that Christianity represents. It is the principal reason why, by and large, most of us who live in post-Christian societies still take for granted that it is nobler to suffer than to inflict suffering. It is why we generally assume that every human life is of equal value. In my morals and ethics, I have learned to accept that I am not Greek or Roman at all, but thoroughly and proudly Christian.

5. Roald Dahl is a famous children's author, but there is a dark side in his writing and his life. This is an interesting and honest tribute from the BBC.

Maria Nikolajeva, professor of children's literature at the University of Cambridge, disputes the notion that there is any darkness in Dahl’s books for younger readers. “He is one of the most colourful and light-hearted children's writers”, she insists. But for all the funniness and dazzling linguistic acrobatics of his prose, she acknowledges that there are problems with his vision. Consider Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
“Wonka is vegetarian and only eats healthy food, but he seduces children with sweets. It's highly immoral”, she says. And then there’s The Witches, whose child narrator, having been turned into a mouse, decides against returning to his human form because he dreads outliving his beloved grandmother. He’d rather die with her, as his abbreviated rodent lifespan will guarantee. “This is a denial of growing up and mortality, but mortality is one of the aspects that makes us human”, Nikolajeva points out. “To tell young readers that you can escape growing up by dying is dubious  – drawn to the utmost an encouragement of suicide – and therefore both an ideological and an aesthetic flaw”.

Worth Reading - 9/10

This week's list of links is a bit longer than usual, since I missed last week. Someday this dissertation will be done.

1. The convocation address at Oklahoma Baptist University was a good one. I say that not only because it was given by David Whitlock, who happens to be my boss, but because I think he has something to say to the culture in the speech. This link takes you to his speech as it was published on Canon and Culture. Below you can watch the video, which is of the whole convocation, but is set to begin at the beginning of Whitlock's speech.

Whether we can possibly fully understand it, as believers and followers of Jesus, we believe and hold to the assurance and conviction that all things are being worked together ultimately for the good of those who love Him and who are called according to His purpose. We have this faith—held as foolishness by the world—that in spite of what may happen around us, it will all culminate precisely as a good and loving God intends, with all things made right, all accounts settled, all evil appropriately dealt, and all things made new and perfect.
Easy comes the belief that things are worse today than at any time in history. Tempting is the feeling that having been born in a different time or era or place, our lives and our work might have been simpler or better. Such thoughts are patently false however, and the Word of God is clear.
In Acts 17:24-28, as he spoke with the leading philosophers in the Areopagus in Athens, Paul said, “The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for ‘In him we live and move and have our being.’”
God determined the allotted periods and boundaries of our dwelling place. Incredible it is to consider that God made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, determined the allotted periods—that is the point of time in history—and the boundaries—that is the territory and geographical nations—of our dwelling places. God made each of us uniquely for this era, this point in history. God chose the location where we were born, chose where we were raised, and purposed where we are now. By His hand and by His will, we were made for Him, for this place, for this hour. And in Him we live and move and have our being.

OBU President Dr. David W. Whitlock inspired a gathering of students, faculty, administration and staff during OBU's annual Convocation Wednesday, Aug. 31. The annual event kicks off the new academic year by bringing together all members of the OBU faculty and student body.

2. Bob Smienata writes about a cat-worshiping cult in Tennessee. They evolved from a charismatic congregation into some weird religious beliefs. The story is interesting of its own right. At the same time, it reveals something of the evolution of mistaken belief into a false religion.

The Rev. Sheryl Ruthven and a few dozen followers left Washington state three years ago, hoping to find a place where they could live in peace and quietly wait out the apocalypse.
Along the way, they hoped to rescue as many cats as possible.
Those cats, according to Ruthven’s writings and interviews with former followers, are divine creatures that will carry the 144,000 souls mentioned in the book of Revelation.
But the group’s unorthodox beliefs and controversial history followed it all the way across the country. In public, Ruthven’s followers, who run a nonprofit cat shelter known as Eva’s Eden, describe themselves as a peaceful group devoted to Mother Nature and living in harmony. They foster dozens of kittens in their homes and host cat adoption events in their air-conditioned mobile cat playground.

3. John Mark Reynolds writes about why black lives matter from a Christian perspective. He's not PC--if anything he is abrasively rationalistic in his approach to issues. He's a long way from liberal. His blog captures the important message the black live matter. Period.

We had three hundred years of slavery and one hundred years of legally enforced segregation. Our local police chief had to eat near the garbage cans as a child, because of the color of his skin. Friends have had jobs denied to them because of race and I have heard racist jokes from Christians in positions of power. These leaders have said that: “They” are troublemakers and we had better not let “them” get too powerful. I have heard this racism with my own ears from Christians and it stinks to heaven. This is not from the past, but from present experience. I once had a manager who grew angry at a pro-life commercial on television because “black people would keep having babies.”
Black lives matter.
No cause is so noble that some twisted soul cannot use it for profit or power. I am told that grifters and wicked men have attached themselves to the phrase, but just as violent extremists do not represent the pro-life movement, so the fringe does not represent millions of African-Americans.

4. Conservative evangelicals take a lot of flack for recognizing the God-given differences between men and women, which include an appreciation of different roles in the church. As a natural outworking of these differences, evangelicals tend to have fewer women engaged in platform work. To be honest, my complementarian tribe hasn't quite figured out how to best use the talents of women without defying Scriptural norms for the pastorate. In any case, Laura Thigpen wrote an excellent piece at the ERLC's blog encouraging women to be more active in speaking and writing for justice.

So, for any woman who finds herself remaining silent out of fear of being insubordinate or sounding uneducated, know that your silence does not bear witness to the gospel in light of these difficult issues. In these conversations on race, abortion, womanhood, and culture our Christian brothers and our culture need to hear the voice of evangelical women, and we need to offer it.
Counter to culture, I believe the very things that make us great homemakers, caregivers, and mothers are the very things that make us great leaders, influencers, and thinkers; these very things make us great women, great, gospel-believing women. This is why we cannot be silent.

5. Andrew Walker from the ERLC writes at the Federalist, calling for the liberals on the left to call off the extremist progressivist bigots who are bent on destroying Christians for being faithful.

But what of compromise and pluralism? An ideal compromise or true pluralism would entail the public recognition that individuals can disagree about the telos (ultimate end) of human sexuality without impugning the motives of the other side. This would mean that individuals and institutions that desire to live out the truth of their convictions about sexuality would not target the other side; nor would citizens face government censure.
This is akin to the disagreement over abortion or organizations that supported same-sex marriage before Obergefell. Concerning abortion, since 1973, citizens and institutions have not generally been targeted for believing that abortion is a moral evil despite the federal government legislating otherwise. Laws like the Hyde Amendment recognized that Americans have deep moral division around abortion and targeting any one side would be wrong.
Concerning marriage, prior to Obergefellgovernment never targeted or harassed advocates for same-sex marriage for wishing to overturn that government’s definition of marriage. All that religious conservatives are asking for is the return to a pre-Obergefell environment where believing that men and women are uniquely made for one another is not a thought crime.

6. Along the same theme of religious liberty and respecting the conscience of others, one pundit in Europe foresees further anti-muslim measures in the form of more burkini-bans. It seems that many people recognize the illiberalness of progressivism.

After a few generations, the things we regard as liberties become second nature and we no longer appreciate them as distinctive. Nor do we notice, until an infraction occurs, that our liberties are often tightly codified and policed. I cannot, generally, go nude on a public beach (thank Heavens). I cannot, generally, sit on a nudist beach in a three piece suit. If I do legally get away with these challenges to local culture, I do so at the risk of isolating myself from those around me. I am refusing integration. Again – to repeat for the sake of not being confused with a French secularist – I actually welcome defiance of liberal secularism. As a Catholic, I regard modesty as a virtue. But France is no longer a culturally or legally Catholic society and I should not expect to receive a sympathetic hearing. This is a nation that once guillotined nuns for refusing to accept the authority of the state. A war on religious swimwear was inevitable somewhere down the line.

7. A six-part series in the LA Times covers the attempt of a couple of high powered lawyers to destroy a PTA mom, an avid school volunteer. They planted drugs in her car because they thought she had been mean to their son. An interesting read for the drama of a real-crime story. It is also revealing of the human heart.

They were outside Plaza Vista School in Irvine, where she had watched her daughter go from kindergarten to fifth grade, where any minute now the girl would be getting out of class to look for her. Parents had entrusted their own kids to Peters for years; she was the school’s PTA president and the heart of its after-school program.
Now she watched as her ruin seemed to unfold before her. Watched as the cop emerged from her car holding a Ziploc bag of marijuana, 17 grams worth, plus a ceramic pot pipe, plus two smaller EZY Dose Pill Pouch baggies, one with 11 Percocet pills, another with 29 Vicodin. It was enough to send her to jail, and more than enough to destroy her name.
Her legs buckled and she was on her knees, shaking violently and sobbing and insisting the drugs were not hers.
The cop, a 22-year veteran, had found drugs on many people, in many settings. When caught, they always lied.

8. The infamous atheist pastor in Canada has been recommended for termination. It is likely she will appeal, and the denominational recommendation wasn't unanimous. This is an interesting day in which we live.

A well-known United Church of Canada clergywoman who describes herself as an atheist is “not suitable to continue as an ordained minister,” says the Toronto arm of the country’s largest Protestant denomination.
Rev. Gretta Vosper, author of several books about her journey to atheism, “does not believe in God, Jesus Christ or the Holy Spirit” and no longer identifies herself as Christian, said the majority report by a Toronto church conference committee.
“She does not recognize the primacy of scripture, she will not conduct the sacraments, and she is no longer in essential agreement with the statement of doctrine of The United Church of Canada.”
The report concludes that if Vosper, 58, applied today to be ordained in the United Church she would not be accepted.

Worth Reading - 8/26

1. My friend Bethany Jenkins writes about a time her parents left her at Hardee's, alone, by accident. It is a humorous and poignant story that Bethany tells well, weaving the gospel throughout it. A worthwhile read.

My parents still had no idea. They were past New Orleans and thought I was sleeping in the seat where I’d placed my backpack and blanket. (Two decades later, I’m still unsure how a backpack and blanket is confused for a 5’10” daughter, and what happened to the biscuit and orange juice.)
Mary Lou called my parents, and they flipped. Dad immediately turned the car around and broke all sorts of speeding laws. But when he finally arrived to Hardee’s, Mom wasn’t in the car. “Where’s Mom?” I asked. Dad replied, “She had to go to the bathroom a few stops back, but the line was so long I left her. We’ll pick her up along the way.” So at one point, we were at three different spots along I-10.
Later friends sent me cards, joking, “We’re sorry your parents don’t love you. We’ll adopt you.” Since Home Alone had just come out, someone drew a cartoon of me at Hardee’s with the caption, “Hardee’s Alone starring Bethany Jenkins.” One of my mom’s friends sent her Stein Mart’s list of “100 Things to Bring to College,” adding “#101—your daughter.”

2. Sam Allberry writes a well-constructed post on how celibacy can fulfill human sexuality. This is an important topic, as Christians need to be for a properly oriented sexuality, not merely against certain types of sexuality.

A friend of mine has an interesting spoon. (Bear with me.) Its slightly larger than a teaspoon and has a large hole in the middle, making it incapable of holding—let alone carrying—the sort of substance that typically requires a spoon. My friend keeps it in his sugar bowl, waiting for unsuspecting guests to attempt productive engagement with it. Some will quietly (but unsuccessfully) persevere with it, not wanting to make a fuss and assuming the fault must somehow lie with them. Others will immediately declare the spoon is ridiculous and insist on something better suited to the task at hand.
The spoon, it turns out, is actually an olive spoon. The hole in the middle is to drain the fluid as you lift the olive to your mouth. And so the lesson for us is this: You can’t make sense of the way the spoon is without understanding what it’s for.
The same is true of our sexuality.

3. In an essay a few years ago, Matthew Anderson wrote about developing intellectual empathy for those with whom we disagree. A good piece and worthy of digging up from the archives.

Like all virtues, intellectual empathy needs some sharp edges to be of much use.  For just as ‘compassion’ can become a sort of loose affection disconnected from a normative order of goods, so too the intellectual good of empathizing and understanding can be disconnected from pursuit of both people’s good of discovering and affirming what is true.  Still, when the gap between outlooks is so wide, it is easy to skip the empathizing and move straight into the work of objecting and persuading.
But lest there be any confusion, let me reiterate that I am not suggesting we should give up our first principles or revise them in our imaginative exercising.  If anything, the opposite.  It is precisely because of our confidence that we are able to enter in to how others see the world, with the freedom to explore along with them and see what they see.  And for the more mercenarily minded, the cultivation of intellectual empathy has the additional effect of helping us find inconsistencies and difficulties internal to their accounts of the world that may make persuasion easier.  Again, that should be a byproduct and never the intention.  But it is a byproduct that deserves at least a mention.

4. Jim Gaffigan is one of the funniest comedians out there, in my opinion. He's had a show on TV Land for a couple of years, which is supposed to be very funny. I've seen one episode and thought it quite good. They've recently announced they are shutting the show down, and the reason is a great one. They feel they can't be effective parents and produce the show. A tough decision, but an important one.

This particular show, the way that we conceived it: It’s about our lives, it’s our unique spin about how we incorporate our faith into our comedy, our children, our real story. It’s not the type of thing where we can just get a room of 22 writes and show up a couple times a week to give notes. The way that we like it to look, and the way that we like it to be cast and the guest stars and all that stuff there’s no system in place to make that happen without us working 80 hours a week. The way that the schedule is, the fact that it airs in the summer, the fact that it’s on cable TV—there’s a multitude of factors that, moving forward, could we do it? Yes. Would it be at the expense of children being people that we raised in their formative years? I don’t think that could happen.

5. What weekend could be complete without watching some lions taking down a large giraffe? See the video below from Smithsonian Magazine.

Worth Reading - 8/19

Here are some links worth reading this weekend:

1. Alan Jacobs wrote an essay about Christian public intellectualism and its apparent decline. The article is long-form and has been much discussed in recent days, scandalizing both the right and the left for different reasons. Whether his assessments are spot-on will no doubt be much debated in the near future, but his analysis is worth considering.

In was in this context — a democratic West seeking to understand why it was fighting and what it was fighting for — that the Christian intellectual arose. Before World War II there had been Christians who were also intellectuals, but not a whole class of people who understood themselves, and were often understood by others, to be watchmen observing the democratic social order and offering a distinctive interpretation of it. Mannheim, who was born Jewish but professed no religious belief, joined with these people because he saw them pursuing the genuine calling of the intellectual. Perhaps Mortimer Adler felt the same way: it would otherwise be difficult to explain why he, also a Jew by birth and also (at that time) without any explicit religious commitments, would think that the West could be saved only through careful attention to the thought of Thomas Aquinas.
Though the key Christian intellectuals of the day and their fellow travelers — Mannheim and Adler, Eliot and Oldham, W. H. Auden, Reinhold Niebuhr, Dorothy Sayers, and many others — did not oppose their social order, they were far more critical than their predecessors had been during World War I. The Christian intellectuals of World War II found their society shaking at its foundations. They were deeply concerned that even if the Allies won, it would be because of technological and economic, not moral and spiritual, superiority; and if technocrats were deemed responsible for winning the war, then those technocrats would control the postwar world. (It is hard to deny that those Christian intellectuals were, on this point at least, truly prophetic.)
But their voices were heard, throughout the war and for a few years after its conclusion. On both sides of the Atlantic, they published articles in leading newspapers and magazines, and books with major presses; they gave lectures at the major universities; they spoke on the radio. C. S. Lewis and Reinhold Niebuhr (to take just two examples) were famous men — appearing on the cover of Time in 1947 and 1948, respectively.

2. Jake Meadors responds to Alan Jacobs' interesting essay with a discussion of Francis Schaeffer as a public intellectual:

In this telling, the post-Christian America that emerged in the 1960s is something that might have been avoided with better management of institutions and more careful interaction with the public square on the part of orthodox believers. This seems naive to me given the way new technologies changed the media landscape in the US and the fact that the post-war economy, which was always hostile to the traditional family, was already being established in the late 40s and early 50s.
What we need is a different kind of interpreter, less Reinhold Niebuhr, that establishment figure who lived and taught in New York City, and more Francis Schaeffer, the missionary-in-exile, far removed from the hubs of power and influence and better equipped to speak to them in distinctly Christian ways precisely because of his distance from them. We need to recognize that the modern western social project (if it even rises to the level of “social project,”) is not something which can be reconciled with the faith by simply making some basic alterations to the machine. Market-backed, government-subsidized expressive individualism is the founding principle of today’s western world. And there can be no salvaging such a project.

3. BBC reveals why it pays to be grumpy and ill-tempered.

Like most emotions, anger begins in the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure responsible for detecting threats to our well-being. It’s extremely efficient – raising the alarm long before the peril enters your conscious awareness. 
Then it’s up to chemical signals in the brain to get you riled up. As the brain is flooded with adrenaline it initiates a burst of impassioned, energetic fury which lasts for several minutes. Breathing and heart rate accelerate and blood pressure skyrockets. Blood rushes into the extremities, leading to the distinctive red face and throbbing forehead veins people get when they’re annoyed.
Though it’s thought to have evolved primarily to prepare the body for physical aggression, this physiological response is known to have other benefits, boosting motivation and giving people the gall to take mental risks.

4. Alan Noble writes about how Christian colleges can keep the faith without harming LGBT students. This is an important question that must be considered in the days ahead.

As societal views of sex, gender, and sexual orientation have shifted, an increasing number of LGBT advocacy groups have started lobbying against the Title IX exemptions on the grounds that they’re a license for religious schools to discriminate. Some have pushed for a change to the law: A recent bill proposed in the California legislature, SB 1146, recommended restrictions to religious exemptions. Legislators like the bill’s sponsor, Ricardo Lara, argued that schools should be required to publicly declare when they apply for exemptions, should not receive state grants if they discriminate, and should be subject to private lawsuits over such discrimination. If SB 1146 had been enacted in this form, it may have eliminated religious exemptions from the discrimination provisions in California’s Equity in Higher Education Act, which require equal treatment in education regardless of gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation, among other classifications. Because of California’s influence on national politics, many religious schools were concerned that if this bill passed, similar laws would be established in other states. This could affect schools’ tax-exempt status or even accreditation, a fear that many in Christian higher education seem to share.
Several groups opposed the legislation and tried to work with Senator Lara on a more mutually acceptable bill. The Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities asked Lara to restrict the bill so that it would only require religious schools to disclose their exemptions, as opposed to ending these exceptions. Similarly, the Coalition of Christian Colleges and Universities strongly opposed the bill because of its potential effect on students’ ability to choose religious schools. On August 10th, Lara announced he would amend the bill to only focus on the disclosure provision and a requirement to report instances in which schools expel students for morality-code violations.

5. George W. Bush is a popular target for mockery. However, a recent biography by a recognized academic seems to have significantly crossed the line from critical analysis to incautious slander. This long review of a biography is interesting, if only to see how strong (and uncomplicated) the negative bias is.

Informed readers will know that the primary tools that we historians bring to our craft are original research — most often in archives, and sometimes through interviews in the case of more recent history — and the passage of time, which cools partisan passions and lends perspective and insight. Smith avails himself of neither of these tools. Other than a couple of cursory interviews with Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, and his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, the book relies almost entirely on secondary sources and previously published books. Even a gratuitously sympathetic reviewer like Jason Zwengerle in the New York Times, concedes: “Smith’s biography of Bush unearths little new information on its subject. Most of Bush relies on previous books by journalists like Peter Baker, Robert Draper and Bob Woodward or the memoirs of key figures including Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Bush himself.”
The book’s opening broadside puts Smith’s vendetta on full display: “Rarely in the history of the United States has the nation been so ill-served as during the presidency of George W. Bush.” A strong charge, to be sure, and yet over page after page, instead of building a scholarly case for this scathing historical indictment, Smith instead produces a profoundly distorted caricature of Bush based on unreliable accounts, factual errors, and wildly implausible judgments. He also on occasion indulges in a viciousness that is unbecoming in a scholar of his stature.

6. I dislike shopping at Walmart. Dislike is not a strong enough word. However, I'll leave it at that. In contrast, Target is normally a much happier place. A recent article in the Bloomberg Businessweek highlights the public nuisance that many Walmarts have become. Walmart often gets kicked around for various practices, but Bloomberg tends to be generally business friendly. This seems to be more than the usual "I hate corporate giants" schtick.

Police departments inevitably compare their local Walmarts with Target stores. Target, Walmart’s largest competitor, is a different kind of retail business, with mostly smaller stores that tend to be located in somewhat more affluent neighborhoods. But there are other reasons Targets have less crime. Unlike most Walmarts, they’re not open 24 hours a day. Nor do they allow people to camp overnight in their parking lots, as Walmarts do. Like Walmart, Target relies heavily on video surveillance, but it employs sophisticated software that can alert the store security office when shoppers spend too much time in front of merchandise or linger for long periods outside after closing time. The biggest difference, police say, is simply that Targets have more staff visible in stores.
“Target doesn’t have these problems,” says Ferguson. “Part of it may be the lower prices at Walmart or where Walmart is located, but when I walk into Target I see uniformed security or someone walking around up front. You see no one at Walmart. It just seems like an easy target.” A Target spokeswoman declined to comment on the two companies’ security policies.

7. A solid post over at Acton explaining why people need to read Solzhenitsyn. I agree.

The appeal of Bernie Sanders’ socialism is a puzzle to many, but it shouldn't be, not if we understand how most people think about economics.  Sanders' appeal rises when economics is understood mechanistically, subject to impersonal forces and nefarious individuals. As a result, an economy can only be directed by the macro decisions of large and powerful entities like governments. Shallow moral appeals arise to justify socialist policies where success is not measured by the objective results of the policy, but by the moral good they ostensibly foster.
It is easy—very easy—to appeal to free education, the eradication of poverty, unlimited minimum wage ceilings and all the other promises made by those who don't have any real experience in wealth creation. Most often their supporters don't either, including the millennial followers of Bernie Sanders. We need to be patient with the ignorance of the young, but we should never acquiesce to it.
Economics is not a mechanistic enterprise. Economics is closely tied to human anthropology—the precepts that define what a human is, how one produces artifacts first for survival and then the building of culture, how one values nature and the principles applied to refashion matter into something new.

Worth Reading - 8/12

Here are some links worth reading this weekend:

1. John Fea writes about a church library in Texas that does an amazing job providing resources for the people in the local church. This is the sort of church library I would dream of having:

JF: Christians are called, among other important things, to love God with their minds. How is the library making an impact on the intellectual life of your church?
RM: Our library has been described by several outsiders as comparable to many Bible college libraries. We have a full range of current and classic Bible commentaries, systematic and biblical theologies, Puritan classics,  books on all categories of Christian doctrine or ministry, Christian living, biographies, and an extensive history section (church and general).  So we have provided the resources to enable the members of our body to grow in the knowledge of Scripture and the doctrines of the faith, in order to equip them to fulfill their individual and collective ministries and strive toward Christian maturity.
In addition to managing the library itself, some time ago I began a library email list. Only those who requested to be included are on it. Presently there are around 75 people on the list, including some who don’t attend CBC.  Every morning, I visit the Gospel Coalition website, along with a few other selected  sites, and review that day’s articles. I then choose 3 to 5 of the most interesting articles and forward them to the library email list. Part of the purpose is to encourage library usage by articles featuring book reviews, but an additional purpose is to increase awareness of issues being discussed in the wider evangelical world.
Let me provide a quote from a response I received last week from a library patron who is on the email list:
“Ron, thank you, once again, for your diligence to spawn discussion and broaden our thinking.”
That is the impact that I would hope the library would have on the intellectual life of our church.
I was particularly influenced by three books that I read a number of years ago:
The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, by Mark Noll.
No Place for Truth: Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? by David Wells.
Between Faith and Criticism: Evangelicals, Scholarship, and the Bible in America, by Mark Noll.
I believe the library has contributed to our body gaining a fuller understanding of other traditions and perspectives. To take three examples of areas where there are often sharp differences of opinion, I have found a receptive  audience for books featuring different views on end times theology, creation (young earth vs old earth, creation science vs intelligent design, etc.), and the on-going “Christian America” debate. And I am always quick to acquire new volumes in the several series giving four or five views on specific subjects, like Zondervan’s Counterpoint series for example. These enable the reader to, in one volume, see different perspectives all together.  
In summary, I do think our library has had an impact on the intellectual life of the church. In the past, this was aided by our church leadership determining not to tie our church to hard positions on secondary matters, such a specific end times theology. And in the present, the library has been enabled by leadership’s continuing financial support for an aggressive library ministry.

2. Last week, Vox published a very reasonable piece on the wage gap between males and females. It gives a very good explanation of the phenomenon and, most importantly, suggests some practical ways that inequities could be addressed.

This might mean moving away from the traditional schedules we’ve become used to, the 9-to-5 hours that became standard when most workers had a spouse at home to handle the emergencies of daily life.
It also means not giving disproportionate rewards to those willing to work the longest, either. Numerous studies find that long hours aren’t always productive.  published last year found that managers couldn’t tell the difference between those who worked an 80-hour week and those who pretended to.
"The research is clear," the Harvard Business Review declared last summer. "Long hours backfire for people and companies."
Closing the wage gap means making jobs work differently. There are some jobs where that won’t be possible. Adding more flexibility won't erase the gender wage gap overnight. But it is part of a larger shift in how we see jobs as different now that most workers are also responsible for some level of child care. And there are plenty where we could certainly try harder.

3. A Washington Post article outlines some of the steps a family with 13 children took to live frugally, get kids through college, and live without debt in a very reasonable economic situation.

Rob and Sam Fatzinger, lifelong residents of Bowie, Md., lead a single-income family in one of the country’s most expensive regions. Rob’s income never topped $50,000 until he was 40; he’s now 51 and earns just north of $100,000 as a software tester.
They have 13 children. Which means they require things like a seven-bedroom house and a 15-passenger van. Four children have graduated from college, three are undergrads and six are on the runway.
Yet they paid off their mortgage early four years ago. They have no debt — never have, besides mortgages. And Rob is on track to retire by 62.
This family gets the gold medal for being frugal. This family is the Einstein of economical.
These days, frugality is not about clipping coupons. It’s about rethinking your finances, and maybe your life.

4. An older post by Derek Rishmawy, which reflects on the reality that our ethics sometimes drive our faith. As Tim Keller pointed out to him, sexually promiscuous college students are more likely to become skeptical of Christianity.  This is a few years old, but worth reading.

Keller illustrated the point by talking about a tactic, one that he admittedly said was almost too cruel to use, that an old college pastor associate of his used when catching up with college students who were home from school. He’d ask them to grab coffee with him to catch up on life. When he’d come to the state of their spiritual lives, they’d often hem and haw, talking about the difficulties and doubts now that they’d taken a little philosophy, or maybe a science class or two, and how it all started to shake the foundations. At that point, he’d look at them and ask one question, “So who have you been sleeping with?” Shocked, their faces would inevitably fall and say something along the lines of, “How did you know?” or a real conversation would ensue. Keller pointed out that it’s a pretty easy bet that when you have a kid coming home with questions about evolution or philosophy, or some such issue, the prior issue is a troubled conscience. Honestly, as a Millennial and college director myself, I’ve seen it with a number of my friends and students—the Bible unsurprisingly starts to become a lot more “doubtful” for some of them once they’d had sex.
And it makes sense, right? When you’re engaged in behavior you’ve been raised to believe is wrong, but is still pretty fun, more than that, powerfully enslaving, you want to find reasons to disbelieve your former moral convictions. As Keller pointed out, Aldous Huxley famously confessed in his work Ends and Means that he didn’t want there to be a God and meaning because it interfered with his sexual freedom. While most of our contemporaries haven’t worked it out quite as philosophically as Huxley has, they’re spiritually in much the same place.

5. An ironic (and intentionally humorous) guide to being a hipster.

1. Never try hard. Because trying hard smacks of earnestness which isn’t at all hipster.
2. Try incredibly hard to look like you’re not trying. This hair doesn’t dishevel itself. But then take/post hundreds of photos of yourself not trying.
3. Take something simple, like brewing tea, and complicate it so that it takes several hours and can then be called a “hobby.” (see also: making a pot of coffee, getting dressed)
4. Defend your hobbies like moral absolutes. Because TeaVana YouthBerry tea is ESSENTIAL to life.
5. Overpay for gross things like kale and quinoa and then defend your use of those things, again, as though life depends on it.
6. Take something simple and classic like ice cream and needlessly complicate/ruin it by adding flavors like bourbon and cayenne pepper. Then charge triple for it and serve it on a plate that used to be part of a barn door or a piece of sheet metal. (see also: hamburgers)
7. Do everything as though you lived in an era before iPhones so that you can post hundreds of pictures of whatever it is you’re doing, from your iPhone.

Worth Reading - 7/29

1. Jemar Tisby from the Reformed African American Network writes for the ERLC about the nature and importance of a whole-life ethic that honors and seeks to preserve human life "from the womb to the tomb."

If Christians follow the Bible they will find themselves at times allies and at times enemies with all kinds of people. While the contribution of certain individuals and organizations during the Civil Rights Movement should never be forgotten, this advocacy is no reason to ignore the contra-biblical practices of abortion providers. Fortunately, many African Americans have consistently opposed abortion. Alveda C. King, the niece of Martin Luther King, Jr., has been a public advocate for life. The National Black Pro-Life Coalition spearheads many pro-life efforts among minorities.
Christians of all races must be concerned with life “from the womb to the tomb” (and beyond!). This is why Christians of any race cannot support Planned Parenthood as long as it conducts abortions. Believers must do this while continuing to creatively address other important issues. The struggle is for the right to life and the right to a quality life. Love for God and his word requires both.

2. Justin Taylor highlights an important new book, which highlights the contribution of eight women in the history of the church. In truth, evangelicals have failed many females in the attempt to overzealously build a hedge around ministry. The egalitarians are wrong, according to Scripture, but the complementarians need to do better. This excerpt, which comes from the writing of Karen Swallow Prior, helps point in a healthier direction.

Both within the church and outside it, we too have treated in a similar fashion the biblical admonition against women preaching: we focus on the single thing that is off-limits and thereby fail to see the abundant opportunities and roles God has clearly offered, some of which are compellingly portrayed in the stories presented in this book. Likewise, the biblical admonition has led too often to extrabiblical limitations on women, as well as unbiblical oppression, also reflected in the societal restraints these eight women experienced during their lives. This kind of failure toward women—unjustly imposed limitations on their personhood and soul equality—has sometimes led to a secondary failure: the failure to see and tell women’s stories clearly, truthfully, and well.
Thus, there exists an abundance of works on the lives of women in the church that present readers with unrealistic saints, not flesh- and-blood women. Such accounts make good fairy tales but not just or suitable examples of the true life of faith. On the other hand, much of today’s retrospectives on women in history tend to focus, understandably and sometimes rightly, on limitations placed on women. Women have been and still are denied much, both in the church and in the culture at large.

3. Carl Ellis writes about the difference between the concept that "black lives matter" and the organization "Black Lives Matter." It's important to recognize the difference and not to second guess people that talk about the concept by accusing them of endorsing everything that is wrong with the registered organization. This is a helpful perspective from a socially conservative African American scholar.


Unless a distinction is clearly made between the two – “blm” and “BLM” – in the minds of the general public and the larger Christian community, or unless organizations issue public statements that distinguish between the two, I find myriad reasons why it’s unwise for Christians to identify with or protest under the “BLM" banner since other less compromising options are available.
For the Christian activist, a distinction also needs to be made between reform, revolution and revolt.  Reform movements seek to improve the existing order.  Revolution movements, if they are committed to truth, seek to abolish the existing order and replace it with a better one.  Revolt movements just seek to tear down the existing order.  History teaches us that without a better replacement as a goal, the result of a revolt is often a new order that is worse than the one that was demolished.  The inconsistencies, lack of accountability caused by its decentralized leadership, and moral murkiness of today’s “BLM” leave it vulnerable to becoming merely a revolt movement.
I have further concerns that the gains and strides made by those who champion “blm” will be eclipsed by the unchecked and counterproductive activities of “BLM.”  As a result, I’ve spent a good portion of this year advising those who ask me about the movement to use caution in affiliating with “BLM” ideology, or when marching under the “BLM” banner.

4. Tim Challies excerpts a book that he's recently read, showing that Eric Liddell's wife never stopped loving him. It's a heart-warming post.

“She couldn’t believe what she was seeing,” remembers Heather. Florence leaned forward on the very lip of her seat, oblivious for more than a full minute to absolutely everything except the scene played out in front of her on a twenty-one-inch television. “It was as if she was there with him, sitting in the stand,” adds Heather. As the race began, Florence was lost in the brightness of it. She even yelled: “Come on, honey. You can beat him. You can do it.”
The last frame of that film shows Liddell after his triumph. He is accepting a congratulatory handshake. The image lingers, freezing him in that pose for a while—the splendor of the man he’d once been so apparent. Florence stood up and looked at it as though in that moment she was remembering every one of the yesterdays she had spent beside him. She bowed her head, raised her hands to her face, and began to weep.

For good measure, I'm linking to footage of Liddell running in the 1924 Paris Olympics.

Worth Reading - 7/22

1. Bernie Sanders is right. The economy is rigged. However, a recent article at Vox argues that the rigging of the economy is more a function of union protectionism and licensing boards than a corporate conspiracy.

Dentists rig the system against dental hygienists by working to make it illegal for hygienists to clean teeth without totally unnecessary supervision by dentists. Taxi medallion oligopolists rig the system against regular folks with cars who would like turn a buck giving people rides. Beauty school cosmetologists rig the system against hair braiders and sidewalk hair-clipper artistes. "Massage therapists" rig the system against anybody with strong hands who might want to give back rubs for cash.
About 30 percent of all jobs in the United States today require some sort of occupational license, up from 5 percent in the early 1950s. This rather dramatic shift is evidence that the economy has indeed become increasingly rigged — which is really just another word for "regulated."
But the rigging of the economy is not just the story of occupational licensing. It’s also the story of big-city gentrifiers who block construction projects that would reduce the cost of housing by expanding its supply, which has the effect of rigging the economy against workers who can no longer afford to live where the best jobs are.

2. Alan Noble, editor at Christ and Pop Culture and Star Wars aficionado, recently wrote a piece that calls for a different sort of culture in churches, including youth groups. There needs to be a space for struggle, and a reason for hope.

I needed to be told that God loved me and that whatever “authentic self” I was so desperately trying to piece together and display for all my peers to approve of, I would never really find it and I didn’t need to try to. I needed—and still need—a church that has space for sadness, fears and anxiety, depression and mental illness. I also need a church that doesn’t let me continue to believe the lie that my life is meaningless until I achieve something, or am loved by someone, or I craft some impressive identity.
All along, my identity was hidden in Christ’s finished work on the cross, an act of unmerited love that objectively grounded and sustained my being in the world regardless of how I felt or what I thought about myself.
The funny thing about working to make yourself good enough to be Christian is that you inevitably end up more self-absorbed and less assured of God’s love for you. If we are not careful, our youth groups and churches can easily develop a culture of image-making—Christians striving to define themselves, especially according to some Christian cultural norms, instead of resting in Christ’s definitive work. The gospel frees us from these endeavors and gives us the space to be fully human, with doubts and anxieties and loves, but also with the grace and love which flows from a heart unburdened by identity and committed to others.

3. Aaron Earls, author in residence at Wardrobe Door, explains that Christians need to embrace the role of villain in contemporary culture.

We are the villains.
Look at our culture’s obsession with radical personal autonomy. Society encourages us to be completely self-absorbed—look out for “number 1,” take care of you and yours.
While everything around us is saying your personal preference should be the deciding factor for every important decision, Christianity is asking us to put that aside for the sake of others.
Instead of getting our way and living how we want to live, we are asked to pick up our cross and die to ourselves. Following Christ means you should be interdependent with others. You should use your gifts to serve the church, working with others who are doing the same.
When others see this lifestyle, it—like our sexual ethic—seems odd and out of place in modern culture. In one sense, it seems too traditional. In another, too extreme.

4. From the New York Times, efforts at advancing renewable energy sources are pushing attempts to curb climate change off course. This includes the devaluing and shutting down of nuclear power, which is the best reliable, low-carbon energy source available.

In Southern Australia, where wind supplies more than a quarter of the region’s power, the spiking prices of electricity when the wind wasn’t blowing full-bore pushed the state government to ask the power company Engie to switch back on a gas-fired plant that had been shut down.
But in what may be the most worrisome development in the combat against climate change, renewables are helping to push nuclear power, the main source of zero-carbon electricity in the United States, into bankruptcy.
The United States, and indeed the world, would do well to reconsider the promise and the limitations of its infatuation with renewable energy.
“The issue is, how do we decarbonize the electricity sector, while keeping the lights on, keeping costs low and avoiding unintended consequences that could make emissions increase?” said Jan Mazurek, who runs the clean power campaign at the environmental advocacy group ClimateWorks.
Addressing those challenges will require a more subtle approach than just attaching more renewables to the grid.

5. Egalitarians have taken to smearing all complementarians with caricatures of abuse. One wife in a complementarian marriage answers some of a recent, vocal critic's questions on her blog.

Jesus condemned a personal-power view of authority. He condemned men who exercised authority in a selfish, domineering manner. He said, “It must not be like that among you!” (Mark 10:43-45)
The misuse/abuse of authority is an abomination to God. He wants leaders to be shepherds after His own heart. (Jeremiah 23:2; Ezekiel 34:1-4; Zechariah 11:17). Some of the Bible’s most scathing condemnations are directed toward leaders who fail to exercise authority in a godly manner. The Lord’s anger burns hot against them (Zechariah 10:3).
According to the Bible, a wife’s submission is her choice alone. A husband does not have the right to force or coerce her to do things against her will. He does not have the right to domineer. He does not have the right to pull rank and use strong-arm tactics. He does not have the right to make his wife submit. No. According to the author of our faith, it must not be like that among us!

6. From BBC, Switzerland is the nation that hates to be late. A fun, interesting read.

Whenever I visit Switzerland, I go through several stages of punctuality reaction. At first it delights me, especially if I’m coming from neighbouring Italy or France with their rather more flexible approach to timekeeping. By contrast, life in Switzerland is sturdy and dependable, like a Saint Bernard dog. If someone says they will meet me at 2 pm, they arrive at 2 pm not 2:05 (or 1:55, for that matter). I like this. For a while.  

Then it annoys me. The extreme punctuality strikes me as a kind of stinginess, and I find myself agreeing with the English writer Evelyn Waugh who said that “punctuality is the virtue of the bored.”

That is unfair though, and finally, invariably, I come to appreciate Swiss punctuality for what it is: a deep expression of respect for other people. A punctual person is a considerate one. By showing up on time – for everything – a Swiss person is saying, in effect, “I value your time and, by extension, I value you.”

Worth Reading - 7/15

Here are some links worth reading this weekend.

1. The late Supreme Court justice, Antonin Scalia, was known for his peppery prose. He wrote with flourishes so that law students would be more likely to read and be interested. He also, in most cases, wrote with a verbal accuracy that reflected his respect for the power of words. This article in the Wall Street Journal explains Scalia's approach.

Scalia, too, considered himself a language snoot. His father, a professor of Romance languages, used to critique his judicial opinions and urge him not to sully the subjunctive. In his 2003 dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, Justice Scalia flouted a language rule and found himself misunderstood by the Associated Press. “I have nothing against homosexuals,” the AP quoted him saying, seeming defensive and patronizing. What Scalia had actually meant was: “I have nothing against homosexuals’ promoting their agenda.” But because of the phrasing, he had left off the apostrophe before “promoting.”
A grammarian would call that flub a fused participle—which sounds ominous, like what a coroner would write on the death certificate after a nude welding accident. It’s actually straightforward: “Sing” is a verb. But “singing” can act like a noun. If you love the tenor’s performance, you enjoy his singing—not him singing.
By breaking the rule, Scalia had brought the misquotation on himself. “I decided to be ungrammatical instead of pedantic,” the justice told William Safire. “God—whom I believe to be a strict grammarian as well as an Englishman—has punished me.”

2. Pornography has been in the news recently, with the RNC identifying porn as a public health crisis (while preparing to nominate someone who has posed for the cover of a porn mag). This article from the New York Times discusses one man's journey from porn advocate to anti-porn fighter. 

In 2011, Mr. Rhodes was lost and in search of support. He created a discussion forum on Reddit on the topic of abstaining from masturbation and pornography. He realized he was far from alone and began his stand-alone site soon after.
After college, he continued to build the site while working as a contractor for Google, specializing in data analysis. He said he earned good money and was able to put a good amount into the website (calledNoFap.com, from a slang term for masturbation). But he was still using the supposed vice he was railing against. It took another failed relationship to get him to quit.
“I think I was relying on pornography as some kind of emotional crutch,” he said. “If anything bad would happen, you would go to porn, because it would always be there.
“I knew it was bad for me,” he said. “But I also realized it was bad for women I was involved with, and that was the moment that I said: ‘I need to leave this thing behind. It is completely distorting my sexuality to the point where it could actually be harmful or at least not enjoyable for other people who I am involved with.’”

3. Joseph Sunde at Acton University identifies the way that Kentucky schools are rethinking the idea of college and career readiness. This is an important conversation that the nation needs to have as we continue to encourage largely unqualified people to spent a great deal of money on college education that they really don't need and may not finish.

Fueled by a mix of misguided cultural pressures and misaligned government incentives, college tuition has been rising for decades, outpacing general inflation by a wide margin. Yet despite the underlying problems, our politicians seem increasingly inclined to cement the status quo.
Whether promoting increased subsidies for student loans or promising “free college” for all, such solutions simply double down on our failed cookie-cutter approach to education and vocation, narrowing rather than expanding the range of educational and vocational possibilities.
Fortunately, despite such an inept response from the top-down, schools at the local and state levels are beginning to respond on their own. In Kentucky, for example, PBS highlights innovative efforts to rethink the meaning of “career-ready” education and retool the state’s incentives and accountability structures accordingly.
While “college-” and “career- readiness” have become buzz words that are assumed to be all but equal, Kentucky has awoken to the reality that they ought not be so lumped together so hastily. Alas, we have tended to amplify college not only to the detriment of career, but to college itself.

4. Demonology has been relegated to the dustbin of religious nuts--and my friend Patrick, who is writing a dissertation on the topic. Here, however, is a psychiatrist arguing that demon possession seems to happen--if rarely--and that maybe there is something to the world besides the material.

I’m a man of science and a lover of history; after studying the classics at Princeton, I trained in psychiatry at Yale and in psychoanalysis at Columbia. That background is why a Catholic priest had asked my professional opinion, which I offered pro bono, about whether this woman was suffering from a mental disorder. This was at the height of the national panic about Satanism. (In a case that helped induce the hysteria, Virginia McMartin and others had recently been charged with alleged Satanic ritual abuse at a Los Angeles preschool; the charges were later dropped.) So I was inclined to skepticism. But my subject’s behavior exceeded what I could explain with my training. She could tell some people their secret weaknesses, such as undue pride. She knew how individuals she’d never known had died, including my mother and her fatal case of ovarian cancer. Six people later vouched to me that, during her exorcisms, they heard her speaking multiple languages, including Latin, completely unfamiliar to her outside of her trances. This was not psychosis; it was what I can only describe as paranormal ability. I concluded that she was possessed. Much later, she permitted me to tell her story.

5. An article from BBC that talks about how babies learn while in the womb. This provides evidence that babies are both human, cognizant, and maybe--just maybe--might deserve the right to be born, even if it is inconvenient for the parents. The article doesn't move in a pro-life direction, but anyone thinking about the issue will likely realize the logical conclusion.

While pregnant with my first child, I heard unsolicited advice typical of that showered upon expectant mothers.
"Don't eat spicy food," and, "Avoid garlic, especially when you're breast-feeding." But as a spicy food-lover I was sceptical, and reluctant to take heed. Human cuisines vary all over the world. Surely babies born to mothers in some of the world's spice capitals must learn to get used to breast milk with more flavoursome notes?
It was pure speculation on my part, but my personal experiment – played out with an unscientific sample size of just one – offered some support. My tiny experimental subject expressed his prenatally-learned love for Thai curry and garlic-spiced breast milk by way of contented guzzling, then guzzling some more.
Some more rigorous scientific research also supports the idea that babies learn taste preferences before they are born. In fact, prenatal learning is not limited to taste. Nor is it limited to humans. What is emerging from the experiments is evidence that all sorts of animal species great and small learn about the world before entering it by paying attention to the tastes, smells, sounds – and even sights – available pre-birth.

6. Sometimes it is trendy to lament the Protestant Reformation. People like to think that it would have been better if Martin Luther hadn't "divided the Church" so that we would still be united. Timothy George, a church historian known for his appreciation of the "great tradition" and desire for catholicity, writes that the reformation was a tragic necessity.

It is not hard to find champions on one side of this antinomy or the other. The tragic side of the Reformation is obvious to those who care deeply about the unity of the church and who feel keenly the dys-evangelical impact of a fractured Christian community and its muted witness in our world today. All Christians repeat Jesus’s prayer for the unity of his church, and yet who can deny the open scandal of the followers of Jesus excluding one another from the Lord’s Table, all the while proclaiming “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Eph. 4:5)?
But the necessity of the Reformation is also evident to those who hear in the teaching of Luther, Zwingli, Bucer, Calvin, Cranmer, and others the good news of God’s free and unfettered grace. The Pauline-Augustinian message of grace found expression in the doctrine of justification by faith alone—not “alone” in the sense of being divorced from a life of holiness and love, but “alone” in the sense of unmerited, “apart from the works of the law.” Necessary too was the recovery of Bible-based proclamation at the heart of the church’s worship, for as the Second Helvetic Confession of 1566 puts it, “The preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God.”

Worth Reading - 7/8

This week has been tragic and gut wrenchingly hard. I would like to find bright and cheery posts and set up an oasis of humor in the midst of the waves of raw emotion. However, I have chosen not too because there are a few posts that I think are very important to share and discuss at this time.

1. Aaron Earls is asking meaningful questions in light of the two shootings of black men on back to back days.

Why are many conservative white Christians afraid of government overreach from a federal government they never see, but never questioning the militarization of the local police department in their backyards?
Why do we acknowledge that the justice system can be unfairly tilted toward someone because of name and connections, but refuse to accept the possibility that it might be unfairly tilted away from someone because of the color of their skin?
If we truly believe that all lives matter, why would we react negatively to someone saying that black lives matter?
As the church in America has increasingly looked to politics as the primary solution for culture, we have allowed that perspective to color everything.
As individual Christians, we should also be thinking through how often our principles shift depending on the circumstances and those involved.
These shootings and the reactions become political. We view it as an “us versus them” situation, instead of treating it as an “us” situation—an attack on human dignity.
The church has to be better. Christians have to be better.

2. A lecture to The Gospel Coalition deals with the issue of Black Lives Matter and whether it is the contemporary Civil Rights movement. This address is vital to understand what the majority of the individuals engaged in the BLM movement feel. Here is the link to the article, but the audio below is worth your time, too. It has helped me shift my understanding of the movement, and I think it is worthwhile to listen to even if you disagree with it in the end.

Before we go any further, I just want to clear up a common misconception about the Black Lives Matter sentiment. Black Lives Matter does not mean “black lives matter only.” It means “black lives matter too.” It’s a contextualized statement, like saying “children’s lives matter.” That doesn’t mean adult lives don’t matter. But in a culture that demeans and disparages them, we understand we have to say forthrightly and particularly that children’s lives matter. In the face of a historic and contemporary context that has uniquely disparaged black life as not worth valuing or protecting in the same way as others, they are saying black lives matter just as much as every other life. Ironically, saying “Black Lives Matter” is really a contextualized way of saying, “All Lives Matter.”

3. At the National Review Online, David French calls for an effort to tap the breaks on the cultural and political divide that seems to be pushing us toward the abyss.

Last night, as the shots rang out across Dallas – as protesters scattered, and we watched the horrible, endlessly replayed video of a police officer’s cold-blooded murder on cable news – I felt that we were witnessing an unraveling. Our unrest hasn’t yet reached the levels of 1968, but it’s moving in that direction – against the backdrop of the worst partisan polarization in decades.
We are faced with choices today. At a time when all the short-term incentives point toward unreason, our leaders, political and cultural, must choose reason. At a time when group solidarity is trumping individual accountability, we must choose individual accountability. At a time when the loudest voices don’t wait for evidence to make sweeping judgments, we must wait for the evidence.

4. John Piper deals with the larger issue of truth in relation to the racial tensions, protection of the unborn, and potential for deception. We must pursue truth, particularly the truth found in the person of Jesus Christ. Some might see this as a deflection of the central issue of the week--the ongoing racial tensions--however, I think Piper is trying to reach the audience of white conservatives struggling with how to engage that issue by relating it to an issue in which they are already engaged. In any case, I think it's worth a read.

Finally, the reality of truth. It is a great irony that the philosophical, academic, and social power of left-wing elites since World War II have devoted themselves to showing that there is no truth. It has no transcendent reality. Truth, they say, is an outmoded enlightenment construct created to justify political, racial, and gender privilege.
This is an irony because it is precisely these left-wing elites that cry most loudly against injustice, not realizing that the limb of truth that they just sawed off is the only one that can provide trans-racial, trans-political, trans-gender, trans-cultural support for justice, and decisive resistance to injustice.

5. Russell Moore writes to help the church process the this week's events. It originated at his blog, but has been reposted at The Gospel Coalition. We have to talk about it. We have to deal with it. The moral fabric of the nation may well depend on it.

What we should understand, first, is that this crisis isn’t new. Many white evangelicals will point to specific cases, and argue the particulars are more complex in those situations than initial news reports might show. But how can anyone deny, after seeing the sheer number of cases and after seeing those in which the situation is all too clear, that there is a problem in terms of the safety of African Americans before the law? That’s especially true when one considers the history of a country in which African Americans have lived with trauma from the very beginning, the initial trauma being the kidnapping and forced enslavement of an entire people with no standing whatsoever before the law. For the black community, these present situations often reverberate with a history of state-sanctioned violence, in a way that many white Americans—including white evangelicals—often don’t understand. 
Second, we should understand the peril here. These shootings, and the root causes behind them, come at a time when the United States is hyper-polarized and socially fragmenting. In addition, there’s a resurgent wave of blatant racism and anti-Semitism on display in social media channels and in upheavals around the world. The social bonds in our culture are weak indeed, and ought to cause us to have the same gravity Great Depression leaders had, not knowing whether the crisis would propel the nation to greatness in problem-solving or to meltdown.

6. A post from the Reformed African American Network on processing pain in a time of grief:

We must also guard our hearts. During times of pain, we are more susceptible to lies and deception. We are prone to self-medicate. We are tempted to look for an escape from reality. Family, we can’t check out. We must pray and stay grounded in the Word. We must process our pain through redemption and truth. Where sin abounds, God’s grace abounds much more.
Processing our pain doesn’t mean that we are to be inactive and silent. It helps to ensure that our hearts do not become bitter. Wounds that are not properly cared for become infected and deadly. Our hearts are wounded. The wounds are deep. The wounds are old, but there is a balm in Gilead.

Worth Reading - 7/1

Here are some links worth reading today:

1. Brent Aucoin, a historian at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, explains why the SBC's resolution distancing itself from the Confederate battle flag. Not only is its origin found in racism, but since the middle of the last century, it has come to be the symbolism for white supremacists. This is a well-written explanation from a well-informed individual, as Brent has spent his academic career exploring civil rights and racist influences in America.

Whether one likes it or not, symbols get loaded with meaning, and it is folly to ignore the reality of such a situation.  For instance, it would be folly on my part to proudly display a rainbow flag because I contend that the rainbow is a symbol of one of God’s promises.  The vast majority of the people who saw my rainbow flag would immediately conclude that I am showing support for the LGBT movement, not reminding people of a promise of God.  In the same way, it is folly to deny the historically-based fact that the Confederate Battle Flag shows support for the white supremacy movement – a movement that Christians have no business being associated with.
If you wish to show your Southern pride, or honor your Confederate ancestors, or demonstrate your support for states’ rights, then there are other flags for you to fly.  But if you insist on continuing to fly the Confederate Battle Flag then no matter what message you think you are communicating you are actually expressing your allegiance to the failed movement to deny blacks basic civil rights.

2. A recent, disturbing trend in religious restrictions is flowering in Russia. A new law drastically restricts speech by outlawing evangelism and invitations to church outside the walls of the church.

Christians in Russia won’t be allowed to email their friends an invitation to church or to evangelize in their own homes if Russia’s newest set of surveillance and anti-terrorism laws are enacted.
The proposed laws, considered the country’s most restrictive measures in post-Soviet history, place broad limitations on missionary work, including preaching, teaching, and engaging in any activity designed to recruit people into a religious group.
To share their faith, citizens must secure a government permit through a registered religious organization, and they cannot evangelize anywhere besides churches and other religious sites. The restrictions even apply to activity in private residences and online.

3. This opinion article from the New York Times explores the influence the real-life experience of J.R.R. Tolkien during World War I influenced his mythological depiction of Mordor. It's an entertaining and informative read:

When the Somme offensive was finally called off in November 1916, a total of about 1.5 million soldiers were dead or wounded. Winston Churchill, who served on the front lines as a lieutenant colonel, criticized the campaign as “a welter of slaughter.” Two of Tolkien’s closest friends, Robert Gilson and Ralph Payton, perished in the battle, and another, Geoffrey Smith, was killed shortly afterward.
Beside the courage of ordinary men, the carnage of war seems also to have opened Tolkien’s eyes to a primal fact about the human condition: the will to power. This is the force animating Sauron, the sorcerer-warlord and great enemy of Middle-earth. “But the only measure that he knows is desire,” explains the wizard Gandalf, “desire for power.” Not even Frodo, the Ring-bearer and chief protagonist, escapes the temptation.
When Tolkien’s trilogy was published, shortly after World War II, many readers assumed that the story of the Ring was a warning about the nuclear age. Tolkien set them straight: “Of course my story is not an allegory of atomic power, but of power (exerted for domination).”
Even this was not the whole story. For Tolkien, there was a spiritual dimension: In the human soul’s struggle against evil, there was a force of grace and goodness stronger than the will to power. Even in a forsaken land, at the threshold of Mordor, Samwise Gamgee apprehends this: “For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: There was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.”

4. Anyone who rejects the reality of systematic racism might think again. A bank in the American South has recently been accused of "red-lining," which is practice of denying or marking up loans to certain (typically minority) communities. The bank settled without acknowledging fault, but the allegations point to a larger, ongoing trend.

Federal regulators filed a complaint Wednesday against a Mississippi bank, accusing it of “numerous” discriminatory mortgage lending practices that harmed African-Americans and other minority borrowers.
The action by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Justice Department against BancorpSouth Bank alleges the bank, based in Tupelo, Miss., engaged in “redlining” by placing its branches in the Memphis area outside of minority neighborhoods and directing nearly all its marketing away from such neighborhoods.

5. Trevin Wax considers whether American Christians have become too focused on religious liberty. As a non-alarmist, Wax raises significant concerns about the ability for Christians to occupy cultural space in the future.

Religious liberty is not just a Christian way of saying “Live and let live.” It is itself an integral part of a flourishing society and a fundamental right for all people.
For this reason, leaders who support religious liberty for Christians also support conscience rights for other faiths.
  • It’s why Christians celebrated the court ruling that recognized the right of a Muslim prisoner to grow a beard.
  • It’s why evangelicals who do not object to birth control defend the right of a Catholic charity to choose not to cover the pill through its insurance plan.
  • It’s why Southern Baptists pass resolutions that defend religious liberty for all Americans, including Muslims, to build houses of worship.
Religious freedom advocates are not inward-focused. The fact that Levin describes their struggle this way gives ammunition to those who would put scare quotes around “religious liberty” – as if it is merely a mask for self-interest or bigotry.
No, religious liberty is more than just a way of making space for our moral vision to flourish; religious liberty is itself part of that moral vision to be shared with the world.