More evil is done in our daily lives through trying to be good than trying to be evil. We are created to do good and love a good God and so our natures are repulsed by embracing evil. A few deeply disturbed humans openly embrace the dark side while most of us do dark deeds and then forgive and forget we have done them. What happens in our thought life, we think, stays in our thought life as if there... Read more

When it comes to Earth, science never showed prideful Christians that the size of our planet mattered and so changed our theology. Christians used to believe the Earth was in the center of the cosmos, but nobody much took pride in the fact. Why do conservative Christians (to attack Catholics) and atheists (to make Christians look stupid) keep repeating these hopeless errors? It isn’t as if this is a complicated question. Some errors cannot be corrected because there are serious... Read more

Christians do not have a love/hate relationship with money. Beware any Christian that spends a great deal of time bemoaning money or lusting after it. Marxism and extreme libertarianism agree: money makes the world go around. The Marxist hopes for something better while the Rand-style libertarian accepts the “truth” and glories in it. The Christian is stuck disagreeing with both: money is not important enough to love or hate. We dignify that which we hate by making it important enough to warp... Read more

Yesterday’s subversive literature is revealing because we often long for the very society the book sets out to undermine . . . rather like Soviet citizens who had to be kept from reading Brothers Karamazov to avoid sympathy for the comparative justice of the old regime. Reread On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Try not to be sickened by the causal abuse of women, children, older people. Study the utter selfishness of the main characters and ask if any of the beauty they “find”... Read more

I remember seeing three black books with a red eye stamped on them in the Rochester Christian School library, checking them out, and riding home on the bus knowing that this was going to be a lost weekend. By Monday, my seventh grade life was changed forever as I was now far more interested in learning Elvish than French or Spanish. Lord of the Rings presented me with an interesting problem. Jesus taught me to love my enemies and nobody... Read more

Someday they will make a movie about a lad who dared to dream he would placekick for the Green Bay Packers only to fail. If so, I am ready for the part. Actually, I hope they never make this movie as such films are almost always unrelievedly bleak and failure is bleak, but not universally so. How do you tell your story when your plot goes awry? When in doubt, I turn first to the Bible, but a close second... Read more

Two types of equally sickening media appear before me daily: sugary sweet happy videos (often containing cats) and highly inflamed rants. Often the rant is just an ad in disguise. Contrary to ads everywhere in my browsing, President Eisenhower was not murdered in any common sense of the word “murder.” Sappiness sells and this makes sense, but anger sells as well: entire networks are dedicated to rage. Rants generate anger as a virus infects a computer: you know you should... Read more

There are desires so intense that they can overwhelm us: this can be a great pleasure or a great danger. Art can stir great passion in us . . . even poor art. One reason to educate ourselves in the arts is to avoid being manipulated by bad artists, learning to outgrow their tricks, and gaining the ability to be moved by great art. Another is that the very best art stimulates the intense feeling that can wreck a man... Read more

When finding out why there is an apple on the ground, it is generally best to look for an apple tree and not Isaac Newton. Sometimes the great scientist is around, but generally all you need for an apple on the ground is a tree. The apple does not fall far from the tree. And so it is when people complain of “liberal” moves in contemporary evangelicalism. I do not like them either: the retreat from sexual ethics, political quietism... Read more

Occasionally I meet someone who tells me that the problem of sin is a problem created by Christians so they can solve the problem! No less a Christian than Saint Paul points out that sometimes a law will cause me (for the first time!) to have the problem described. Certainly one problem with many a Christian school is that their rules might be the first time that many ever considered the “sinful” nature of a thing. I once was confronted... Read more