Sex as Natural Means to Commitment

January 11, 2013 By Joe Carter

Tim Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: The modern sexual revolution find the idea of abstinence till marriage to be so unrealistic as to be ludicrous. In fact, many people believe it is psychologically unhealthy and harmful. Yet despite the contemporary incredulity, this has been the unquestioned uniform teaching of not only one but all of the Christian churches—Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant. The Bible does not counsel sexual abstinence before marriage because it has such a low view of sex but because... Read more

The U.S. is Not as Violent as You Think

January 11, 2013 By Joe Carter

Since the shooting in Newtown there has been hundreds of articles written about guns, gun control, and gun violence. Patrick Cahalan has written the best of the bunch: Basically, you’re not very likely to be murdered in either [the U.S. or the U.K. Really. In fact, given that 10% of the murders in the U.S. are family-related, and given that 74% of murder defendants have a prior criminal record, and 44% of murder victims have a prior criminal record, and that 82% of non-family... Read more

Babies in the Womb Begin Learning Language from Their Mothers

January 11, 2013 By Joe Carter

Babies only hours old are able to differentiate between sounds from their native language and a foreign language, scientists have discovered: Sensory and brain mechanisms for hearing are developed at 30 weeks of gestational age, and the new study shows that unborn babies are listening to their mothers talk during the last 10 weeks of pregnancy and at birth can demonstrate what they’ve heard. “The mother has first dibs on influencing the child’s brain,” said Patricia Kuhl, co-author and co-director... Read more

Thinking Like Jesus

January 10, 2013 By Joe Carter

R.C. Sproul on thinking like Jesus: Several years ago, I was asked to give a convocation address at a major theological seminary in America. In that address, I spoke about the critical role of logic in biblical interpretation, and I pleaded for seminaries to include courses on logic in their required curricula. In almost any seminary’s course of study, students are required to learn something of the original biblical languages, Hebrew and Greek. They are taught to look at the... Read more

Why You Won’t Be the Person You Expect to Be

January 10, 2013 By Joe Carter

Somewhere an 87 year old man is looking back on his life and saying to himself, “You know, when I was 65 I just didn’t have a clue.” They called this phenomenon the “end of history illusion,” in which people tend to “underestimate how much they will change in the future.” According to their research, which involved more than 19,000 people ages 18 to 68, the illusion persists from teenage years into retirement. “Middle-aged people — like me — often... Read more

Medieval Churches with Stained Glass Were Photocatalytic Air Purifiers

January 10, 2013 By Joe Carter

A researcher has found that tiny gold particles found in medieval gold paint reacted with sunlight to destroy air-borne pollutants: The glaziers who created gold-painted stained glass windows for medieval churches in Europe inadvertently developed a solar-powered nanotech air-purification system. According to Zhu Huai Yong, an associate professor at Queensland University of Technology in Australia, the gold paint used in medieval-era stained glass windows purified the air when heated by sunlight. “For centuries people appreciated only the beautiful works of... Read more

Snow is the New Noir

January 9, 2013 By Joe Carter

The white of ice can be as powerful a filmmaking tool as shadow, says Ian Buckwalter. Classic film noirs used their dark settings as direct reflections of their subject matter, as well as to create the sense of their heroes getting lost. They tapped into our natural fears of the dark in the same way that horror movies do, creating tension through our instinctual sense that there are dangerous things lurking in the shadows. But just as instinctual is the... Read more

Religious Art for Nonbelievers

January 9, 2013 By Joe Carter

What can nonbelievers learn from religious art? Quite a lot, says Aaron Rosen in an article in The Humanist: This is not simply to say that all religious expressions are artistic. But what religious symbols can do, more powerfully than any other, is reveal a horizon of meaning towards which art aspires: the ability to make ontological claims about “the way things really are”. To come back to some philosophical language from Gadamer, religious symbols perfect the “intricate interplay of showing and... Read more

Jerry Seinfeld Explains How to Write a Joke

January 9, 2013 By Joe Carter

The comedian describes the anatomy of his Pop-Tart joke and shows his longhand writing process. Read more

Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You

January 8, 2013 By Joe Carter

For any network where some people have more friends than others, it’s a theorem that the average number of friends of friends is always greater than the average number of friends of individuals. This phenomenon has been called the friendship paradox. Its explanation hinges on a numerical pattern — a particular kind of “weighted average” — that comes up in many other situations. Understanding that pattern will help you feel better about some of life’s little annoyances. For example, imagine... Read more