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A Mormon President

December 7, 2007 By Gene Veith

So, are you placated by Mitt Romney’s JFK moment as he addressed concerns about his Mormon faith? Mormons tend to be strong on civic righteousness, to use a term from the other day, so he’d probably be OK. Michael Gerson has a good analysis of the speech, showing how he was actually differing in a substantial way from what Kennedy said about his Catholicism, insisting that faith does have a role in the public square. But I still have qualms…. Read more

Prince Caspian, the Movie

December 7, 2007 By Gene Veith

4 Comments

The trailer is out for the movie, which will be released May 16. This chronicle of Narnia by C. S. Lewis is about a time when the land has forgotten Aslan. In other words, it is about OUR world. Yes, I’ve written a book expounding Lewis’s novel, which will come out in February. Here is the trailer for the movie, which has the same young actors as “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” and which looks promising, though we’ll… Read more

Happy Pearl Harbor Day

December 7, 2007 By Gene Veith

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When something bad happens, it always comes as a surprise. Read more

Over-Committed to the Bible?

December 6, 2007 By Gene Veith

62 Comments

J. P. Moreland is a respected evangelical scholar and Christian apologist. Now he has roiled the Christian world by a paper he delivered at the recent Evangelical Theological Society conference entitled How Evangelicals Became Over-Committed to the Bible and What Can Be Done About It. Dr. Moreland affirms the inerrancy and the authority of Scripture, but he is decrying the way conservative Protestants tend to make the Bible the ONLY source of spiritual and moral knowledge. He thinks Christians should… Read more

The New Age Candidate

December 6, 2007 By Gene Veith

14 Comments

Many Americans are fretting about the Mormon candidate, but for scary religious beliefs, what about Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich? This article is about the rather geeky congressman managing to get himself a strikingly beautiful wife. But what is reveals is Kucinich’s over-the-top New Age beliefs. He is a disciple of Shirley MacLaine, a vegan, a devotee of New Age “consciousness” and “energy,” and the whole shebang, including, as is well known, the reality and mystical significance of UFO’s. In our… Read more

Pre-Modern Politics

December 5, 2007 By Gene Veith

60 Comments

I’m sitting in on classes of the new faculty members here at Patrick Henry College to see how they are doing. Here are some things I picked up from Dr. Stephen Baskerville’s class “Freedom’s Foundations I,” a core “Great Books” course. The class was reading Edmund Burke, hailed as the father of modern conservatism. I learned that there really was no “conservative/liberal” distinction before the modern era, specifically, before the French Revolution. Also that in the modern era, political writings… Read more

The Lutheran Doctrine of Culture

December 5, 2007 By Gene Veith

38 Comments

Thanks to Frank Sonnek in a comment yesterday for alerting me, via Cyberbrethren, to Charles Arand’s article in “Lutheran Quarterly” a few years ago entitled Two Kinds of Righteousness as a Framework for Law and Gospel in the Apology. A sample: What is meant by two kinds of human righteousness? Theologically, to be righteous is to be human as God envisioned in creation, and again in redemption. One might modify the Athanasian dictum to say, ‘‘God became fully human that… Read more

Good News on the International Front

December 4, 2007 By Gene Veith

36 Comments

Not only did the people of Venezuela thwart the power grab of their socialist leader Hugo Chavez, but now we learn that maybe Iran is not close to having a nuclear bomb after all. Most people, I suspect, greeted that latter revelation from a new intelligence assessment with a sigh of relief. The way it is being spun, though, in the media is that this is a “blow” for the Bush administration! Does anyone think that President Bush relished having… Read more

Divorce Harms the Environment

December 4, 2007 By Gene Veith

18 Comments

A new study has found that divorce is harmful to the environment, since separate households use more resources and are less efficient than one (the study finding evidence for the perfectly obvious). But maybe these findings will do some good, at least with those with a postmodern sense of morality. Those with troubled marriages often no longer are persuaded that they should stay together for the sake of children. Maybe they will stay together for the sake of the environment. Read more

Morality Helping Science

December 4, 2007 By Gene Veith

20 Comments

Charles Krauthammer, who was a medical doctor before he became a pundit, says that the newly discovered way of making “pluripotent” cells from ordinary skin cells is going to be easier, cheaper, and better than harvesting stem cells from unborn children. He credits the pro-life policy of George Bush for pushing the research in this direction. High moral standards have actually HELPED science. Read more