David Brooks: The journalists at Charlie Hebdo are now rightly being celebrated as martyrs on behalf of freedom of expression, but let’s face it: If they had tried to publish their satirical newspaper on any American university campus over the last two decades it wouldn’t have lasted 30 seconds. Student and faculty groups would have accused them of hate speech. The administration would have cut financing and shut them down. Public reaction to the attack in Paris has revealed that... Read more
Under Locke and Key Joseph Loconte is associate professor of history at The King’s College in New York City. His latest book, God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West, framed this discussion. David George Moore who blogs at www.twocities.org conducted the interview. Moore: Give us a quick overview of your book. Loconte: The book argues that the single most important defense of religious freedom in the West—John Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689)—was not a... Read more
Back to the land/farm movement: America’s heartland is graying. The average age of a farmer in the U.S. is 58.3 — and that number has been steadily ticking upward for more than 30 years. Image credit Overall, fewer young people are choosing a life on the land. But in some places around the country, like Maine, that trend is reversing. Small agriculture may be getting big again — and there’s new crop of farmers to thank for it…. Gelvosa and... Read more
Mel Robbins, and I agree with her: (CNN)Almost two years since the Tsarnaev brothers allegedly placed two bombs at the Boston Marathon finish line, turning the city’s beloved Patriot’s Day race into a war zone, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is finally going on trial. By the time the brothers were captured (one dead, one alive), they were accused of having killed four people, blown the limbs off another 16 and injured more than 260. But while I have heard many say they... Read more
“Shepherd, Lead Me” (by John Frye) How God guides us is a beautiful mystery. I grew up under the pressing fundamentalist question: “What is God’s will for your life?” In youth group and summer camp I was repeatedly taught and urged to follow clear steps and biblical guidelines so that I could know God’s will. God’s will was this thing like a scheduled train; if you missed it, it was gone forever with a nod toward Walker Percy’s question: “What... Read more
A friend (Mark Stevens) writes me this note, and I use it with permission: Every year around this time I enter a kind of pastoral confusion on what to preach. I trust you as both a teacher and evangelical. Every year I am tempted by the lectionary and every year I have my reservations as it seems the domain of liberals and folks who want to do away with the historicity of certain elements of scripture. Let’s call them the... Read more
Source: We’ve all heard the claims, the theories, and the speculation about the ways leadership styles vary between women and men. Our latest survey data puts some hard numbers into the mix. Our data come from 360 evaluations, so what they are tracking is the judgment of a leader’s peers, bosses, and direct reports. We ask these individuals to rate each leader’s effectiveness overall and also to judge how strong he or she is on the 16 competencies that our... Read more
A longer title to this post could be “What the Old Testament really says about our relationship to the rest of creation … and why it matters.” That is a bit of a mouthful though. The short title could be simply “Earth Keeping.” This isn’t some conservationist piece, trying to fit the Old Testament into a modern “Green” narrative. Rather Iain Provan in Seriously Dangerous Religion tries to dig past many recent misinterpretations to look at the view of creation... Read more
There is a widespread meme at work in how Christian theologians are now talking about the future — about heaven or the new heavens and the new earth or about the final state. It has three parts: Part A: Most Christians — seemingly all — think they go to heaven when they die and that heaven is a kind of hyper spiritual existence. Part B: The Bible teaches not that heaven is our final destiny but that it is a... Read more
Tim Worstall: As part of the verbal and political sparring leading up to the coming Greek elections, we see that various Germans are now saying that the euro, the eurozone, could survive Greek exit from it just fine. My own opinion is that this is mistaken: but not for the reasons usually thought of. Sure, if Greece did exit then there may or may not be a spike in interest rates in, say, Portugal and or Ireland. Maybe the ECB... Read more
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