People are always doing wrong things to avoid doing another wrong thing. This is a very bad idea, but it is an especially bad idea when the evil done is worse than the evil avoided. Jesus said: Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites; because you tithe mint, and anise, and cummin, and have left the weightier things of the law; judgment, and mercy, and faith. These things you ought to have done, and not to leave those undone. Blind... Read more
I am tempted to like stories more that fit what I wish was, is, and will be. If there is a headline that says “Evidence Shows Bible True!,” then I am tempted to click on it and be (just a bit!) less skeptical about what it says. Nobody rational thinks this bias is all good, the dangers of confirmation bias are well known, but then most of the time this filter serves a very useful function. I have thought very,... Read more
An important job for thinkers is to look for the root cause of cultural problems. If only we could find why we had this problem, got to the very bottom of the cultural weed, then we could not only pull it out, but make sure it did not return. That can be good, but it always is fertile ground for demagoguery. A great temptation is to see someone, especially someone who disagrees with us, as the root cause for all our problems. This... Read more
The wind is blowing hard in New York City. Compared to Houston it is a cold wind, the air is thin here. In Sugar Land, Texas, the heavy air moans by the window when it blows, but here it is shrieking. The difference makes me just a bit nervous, but also awake. I am glad to be inside, but perhaps I shall go outside. I had forgotten that New York City is old yet still growing. I have heard creaks... Read more
A person I admire wrote on adoption and I said what a good book it was. This was a mistake, at least for the peace in my social media feed. Two years ago as a result of this innocent shout out, I started getting interactions with a group of “white nationalists” and they haven’t ended yet. They were aggressive, but their recruiting techniques were shades of That Hideous Strength or getting into the cool kids club in high school. If you... Read more
Better to die than to tell a lie. Why? Truth is out there, but it can be hard to understand, find, and even harder to know when we have found it! We embrace lies as truth and ignore the truth as if it is a lie. For all those reasons, truth is precious and so lying, which makes the riches of truth inaccessible, horrible for humankind. What is a lie? It is at least this: willfully, knowingly giving false witness. When... Read more
I often get asked why I do not write on every Big Story of the Day. This sort of question caused me to step back and think: “What should I write? What are my goals? What should my goals be?” If you like to think, and your preferred method is to process “out loud,” learning to be silent on a topic is as important as speaking. As a result, I have three rules for when I should be silent on a... Read more
I have spent over thirty years in higher education, mostly in Christian higher education. I have known saintly presidents like the late Clyde Cook of Biola University, passionate Christians like Professor JP Moreland, and highly skilled Deans like HBU’s Doris Warren. For seventeen years, my joy was to work with the faculty at the Torrey Honors Institute. I get to work with a dynamic President like King’s College Greg Thornbury and the brilliant Dr. Stacey here at The Saint Constantine... Read more
One of my children got the mail and was excited. This young adult had received a financial package that made her dream school possible. Hope and I were excited until we read the letter very carefully. The school counted loans as student “aid.” At the end of our child’s time at this school, she would have owed one hundred thousand dollars. Let me state this bluntly: that school was scamming my child with four college half-truths. This is hard to say, but... Read more
Let’s face it: the church of a Cross, martyrs, and the school for souls is not the church where the right words can make all the pain go away. Once as a boy, I was in the car and my daddy was listening to one of the “name it, claim it” pastors. At one point, the man dismissed Paul’s thorn in the flesh, some unknown problem that God would not heal, with the statement: Paul lacked the New Testament. We... Read more
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