Culture
Mary Weller: Stealing Candy from Babies: Trans-Activism, Gender, and Kids
What movements are at work to reshape sexual identity in public policy, schools, and in the home? Mary Weller gives insight into the workings of various movements, and frames a biblical worldview so that Christians can respond to them.
STOLEN IDENTITY: THE THEFT OF THE BINARY SCHEDULE
Monday Emilio Ramos: The Metaverse and Personhood (12pm EST) Mary Weller: Stealing Candy From Babies: Trans-Activism, Gender, and Kids (9pm EST) Tuesday Andrea Williams: Law and Personhood (12pm EST) Samuel Sey: Intersectionality and Identity (9pm EST) Wednesday Carl Teichrib: The Rising Global Spirituality and the Search for Personhood (12pm EST) Pamela Frost: Stolen Identity: The Enneagram (9pm EST) Thursday Eowyn Stoddard: The Stolen…
Online Symposium September 26-30
A clever insult fits the theme of our up-coming online symposium: “He is a self-made man and he worships his creator.” The title of the symposium is Stolen Identity: The Theft of the Binary in Contemporary Society. This event, consisting of nine gifted speakers, deals with personal identity and identity politics. So don’t miss it! It…
The Significance of the Incarnation
Christmas is the time of gift-giving. The Incarnation is the time of the greatest gift ever given in the history of the universe. God, the Creator of the Universe, who is ultimately unknowable, gave to human beings the good gift of being part of the creation, and now gives himself in the person of his…
Medicalizing the Absurd
In 1973, Karl Menninger wrote Whatever Became of Sin? He was responding to a cultural move away from any concept of moral transgression. The sociologists and psychologists of the day redefined what Western Christianity had always considered as sinful fruit of dark and hardened hearts. Instead, they argued that those effects, whether individual or corporate,…
The Cosmic Border Crisis
Cities. For some the word evokes thoughts of skyscrapers, taxi cabs, subway systems, and an integrated nexus of life, lifestyle, and labor. For others the word brings to mind a hurried pace they would better off avoid, a cultural environment where people are reduced to business machinery and secularism rules from an unimpeachable iron throne.…
Naming the Void
In the recent article, “The Three Hebrew Words that Describe Our Time,”[1] opinion writer Martin E. Marty puts his finger on the underlying issue in our current climate of cultural chaos. What are those three Hebrew words? Tohu wa-bohu. This is the phrase that appears in Gen. 1:2, “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was…
The Speech Police Are at the Door
The Speech police are at American doors, especially in the case of same-sex marriage. As someone has said, liberal public opinion promoting same-sex marriage is "evolving in the direction of both theological certainty and illiberal intolerance." Expressing their own ideological prejudice, liberals want opponents to have absolutely no place in their godless utopia.
BEYOND CAPES AND COWBELLS: How a Christian Approach to Law and Virtue Transcends Both Autonomy and Authoritarianism
Law often functions as the proverbial executioner’s sword to deter unlawful action. But can it also serve as a sculptor’s chisel to help form a more virtuous public? A positive answer to that question has a long and diverse pedigree in Western culture. For Aristotle, a “chief concern of political science is to endue the…
Suffering for Jesus
Uncivil war has been declared on Christians who, in loving humility, have boldly addressed issues of sin in order to announce the cleansing power of the Gospel. As public vitriol heats up, “The Final Solution” for some could well be to treat Christians as insects that must be squashed. Certainly, believers must defend their civic and legal rights and seek the well-being of the public square. But we go forward in the strength of this divine promise, that in suffering for Jesus there is blessing, and beyond the cross there is unimaginable glory. In the meantime, we beg God’s mercy on his church and our culture and seek to love our neighbors and promote their ultimate good.
Just Believe
Last week I stood in line at a local sandwich shop waiting to pay for my order. In front of me was a young couple in their 20s and the woman of the pair was wearing a tank top. I could see four words tattooed on her left shoulder, each on its own line: Hope Believe…
Reincarnated or R.I.P.?
In an article by the Pew Research Center I read a statistic that popped right off the screen at me: 22% of Christians believe in Reincarnation. What? Christians?? It’s a little hard to believe at first, but it’s true. Think about that for a minute. Say you’re sitting in a mainline church of 500 people. …
The Writing on the Bathroom Wall — What does it mean?
Today I read an article with the provocative title: “University To Offer ‘Gender-Open’ Restrooms.” It noted that non-specific gender bathrooms are now common-place on some 150 college campuses. It is easy to qualify this fact as a further desirable expression of civil rights, tolerance and freedom, but it is much more a striking piece of evidence of…
Let the Little Ones Come to Me! — Social Justice Gone Awry
Christians cannot dig wells in Africa without telling thirsty sinners of the wells of salvation. They cannot speak of blessings without speaking also of the curse of human evil. Children must hear the difference between the Lie and the Truth in order to place their trust in Jesus as their only Savior, and we must obey the Savior’s command: “Let the little ones come to me.”
Laying Down the Law on Yoga Mats and Marriage
The god of gay marriage and yoga is not the transcendent personal Creator of Scripture, but the divine self within, who creates its own reality and the laws to go with it. So, losing the God of Scripture is not merely a religious event. It means we lose the objective source of law.
Scotus Scotches the Scriptures
On June 26, 2013, the highest authority in the land declared the constitutionality of homosexuality as a value to be defended and promoted in modern day America. For the first time, the Supreme Court declared that the federal government may not discriminate against same-sex couples whose marriage is recognized by a state. In the case…
The Victory of the Pagan Cosmology
This period of legalization will be followed by the institutionalization and normalization of the victory, both by extending the implications to all manner of "loves," and by the aggressive silencing all opposition, for a peaceful, unified world--built, alas, on the putrefaction of the sinful human heart, that will eventually choke on its own vomit! Our culture will be "given over" to its sinful choices, as Paul says in Romans 1:24, without any "Gospel restraint," but it is not the final word. Because God gave over his Son to bear the sin of the world as a sacrificial victim, He will return as Lord and Judge of the earth to set all things right.
CULTURE WARTS or FAITHFUL SERVANTS? Part 2
Jungian spirituality has seduced the masses. Jung’s personal practice of occultism and sexual freedom, presented as a “scientific” method, gave vast authority to the subconscious. People today justify all kinds of pagan spiritualities and sexual fantasies in the name of self-expression and spiritual health. Not the Bible but my subconscious “tells me so.” This corresponds with the Sixties Jungian mantra, “If it moves, fondle it, if it feels good, just do it.” This last phrase became a Nike commercial!
Cultural Warts or Faithful Servants?
Why is Christianity so unpopular now?... The younger Christian generation faces the enormous danger of allowing the culture to throw out our baby with their “baggage.”
IO 90: No “Next big thing”?—Bad conclusion!
“Salvation is not…escaping some dreadful fate of judgment…at the hands of a wrathful God; rather, it is being saved to ourselves.” She leaves no place for the cross or the atonement.
IO 89: May 09, 2012: The Official End of Christendom?
May 9th 2012 is in many ways the final “sacralization” of the Sixties, where behind the pretext of the Golden Rule, the “revolution” fraudulently covers its unrestrained libido in the white robes of bridal purity.
IO 88: For Shame—Speech Crimes and Ideology
The hypocritical shaming of those who live by the old standards, seeks to integrate the general public into the new standards of “decency” and “shame”—where evil is good and good is evil