Valentine’s weekend. Warm thoughts, cold everything else. Only we were headed to Boston for a long weekend and a conference. Except the blizzard came to town, and I don’t mean the DQ blizzard. We never got to Boston, and watching the Valentine’s Day massacre on the highways and byways around Boston, and the 79 freaking inches of snow pile up, we were glad we never got there. So….. instead, Boston came to us. Over a foot of dry powdery snow,... Read more

Ah retirement, the desideratum of millions of Americans. And in the culture of entitlement of course, if someone takes away your retirement, well, those are fighting words. Retirement is of course a totally modern, not a Biblical concept. The idea that you should be able to live out your golden years traveling around in a gas-guzzling Winnabago, spending your grandchildren’s inheritance, is of course just another bit of nice narcissism promoted by our culture. There is nothing Biblical about it.... Read more

Well ‘its not a matter of life and death’. You hear this all the time as a common sense expression. What it reflects is the ethical priorities of our culture. Every culture has a value hierarchy, and ‘going on living, whatever the cost, because you only go around once in this life’ seems to be at the top of our value hierarchy. Continuing living seems to trump truth, or honor. We’d rather lie than die. We’d rather be publicly shamed... Read more

“It’s just common sense, you’re supposed to look out for number one, and for your family, and anything else comes after that.” Ah the logic of self-preservation and self-protection and self-service. It is everywhere in our culture. It is so basic to our individualistic and narcissistic culture that you hardly hear it either defended or explained. It’s just taken for granted. You even hear Christians say things like this, which is just another sign of Biblical illiteracy being rampant in... Read more

On first blush this episode could just as easily been called ‘Finding John the Baptizer’. On the whole I thought this episode was certainly better, with less pure conjecture and less dogmatic pronouncements based on carbon dating involved. I thought that the testing of the bone found under the Bulgarian monastery was quite interesting, though of course things could only be narrowed down to it came from the right period and the right region. But the Oxford project of testing... Read more

Here’s a little excerpt from the John the Baptist portion of the Finding Jesus series….. http://edition.cnn.com/videos/tv/2015/03/03/finding-jesus-blood-ties-in-the-bible.cnn/video/playlists/finding-jesus/ Read more

Sadly, our friend Fred Craddock, the most masterful of all old Southern preachers, has gone to be with Jesus at age 86. Here are a couple of samples of our friend Fred. He was here only a couple of years ago in Lexington preaching the anniversary sermon at the oldest Christian Church in the area. It was a treat. He was the best preacher I ever heard at Lake Junalaska growing up, at Annual Conference meetings. If you don’t know... Read more

Our topic for this post is ‘freedom of speech’. You will often hear it said “in a democracy, obviously there should be freedom of speech, it’s just common sense”. Yet there is not a single democracy where there are not laws limiting freedom of speech— laws against libelous remarks, laws against hate speech, laws against verbal threats of various sorts. In other words, there are no democracies where there is an absolutely unfettered right to freedom of speech, nor should... Read more

“Everyone should have the right to get married, it’s just common sense”. I’ll bet you’ve heard that one before. Let me just say at the outset, I’m not concerned with the whole argument over civil unions performed by a justice of the peace. Secular law is one thing, Christian marriage is another. When it comes to Christian marriage, marriage is not a right at all— it is a privilege granted by God, and some would even say, it’s a sacrament—... Read more

Yet another harangue you hear these days after the exclamation “it’s just common sense” is “we should demand our rights”. Unfortunately, we now live in the ‘entitlement’ age, where everyone wants to demand their rights, and too few people are willing to take responsibility for their actions. I can’t even go through a day without seeing maybe a dozen ads for law firms who are going to ‘help you get what’s coming to you, by right’. We are being urged... Read more