For years, I’ve struggled with this. We are told that we are all created in God’s image. We are also told that the Bible clearly condemns sexual relations between members of the same sex. These two messages have clashed in my brain since I’ve been old enough to understand them. As a teacher of middle school aged children, I know that many people are born with an attraction to members of the same sex. I have seen it first hand... Read more
For many years now, I’ve been waging a quiet and subtle battle against a persistent myth about public education. There is a wide-spread belief among more conservative Christians that God has somehow been “locked out” of public schools and that the moment we allowed that to happen, our society began to become morally bankrupt. I’ve seen dozens of memes circulating around social media since it’s inception about how prayer isn’t allowed in public schools–how they stopped saying the Pledge of... Read more
Over the last couple years, progressive Christians have been shouting to anyone who would listen about the cruel and anti-Christian immigration policies along our border with Mexico. Tens of thousands of asylum-seeking families have been detained, separated, and have faced terrible abuse in concentration camps. This should never be associated with the United States of America. What’s been going on at our southern border is exactly the kind of thing that America has a history of putting a stop to when... Read more
As we all pause to appreciate our military veterans today, I’ve been thinking about the meaning of patriotism. It’s been disturbing for me to watch the battle for control of the definition of patriotism devolve into a wrestling match between white Christian, nationalist Trump supporters and the rest of the country. Obviously, I generalized things a bit in that last sentence, but there is a lot more truth in it than I wish there were. Conservative Christians seem to think... Read more
There is not a book in the history of the world that has been so meticulously studied, interpreted, reinterpreted, misinterpreted, debated, used, abused, and weaponized as the Holy Bible. The only other books in the running would be the Torah and the Koran, both of which share much of the same story. A recent article I wrote got me to thinking about this topic. In that article, I wrote the following statement: “We are a nation with a large number... Read more
We now are a nation of tribes engaged in war. We are now a nation with a surplus of people with megaphones and a critical deficit of listeners. We are now a nation of people who are losing our capacity for empathy, always in a defensive posture, always quick to lash out at the first sign of a perceived slight. We are a nation with a large number of Christians who have lost touch with the most important themes in... Read more
The current state of public education in America is an extremely serious crisis. The vast majority of school districts around the nation are having terrible difficulty in filling their ever-increasing teacher vacancies. Millions of teachers are leaving the profession and schools of education in universities around the nation are reporting ever-dwindling enrollments. Teachers are being worn down by the increasingly heavy load that comes with the job; overcrowded classrooms, dealing with discipline issues they should never have to put up... Read more
My wife and I were married in 1994. For the first several years of our marriage, we were unable to get pregnant. Although at that point in our marriage we couldn’t really afford it, we decided to pursue fertility treatments. Eventually, my wife did become pregnant. We were so happy. We proudly showed the ultrasound pictures to friends and family, began preparing the nursery, and we picked out a name. She was to be called Hannah. Hannah would have been... Read more
The topic of faith vs. good works goes back a long way in Christendom. Ultimately, that question is the reason we have two branches of the Christian faith, Catholicism and Protestantism. Sometimes I feel like the Protestant slant that we are saved by faith alone gets a bit abused. I sense that sometimes, people use that as an excuse not to do good works. That’s not how it’s supposed to be. After all, it was the original Protestant, Martin Luther,... Read more
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The Biggest Misconception in Our Nation Fuels Most of Our Fires
American conservative Christians keep screaming about how their beliefs are under attack. In doing so, they reveal that they don’t even know a thing about their own country. They base their paranoid protests on a false premise. They apparently believe and continue to insist that America was founded as a Christian nation–that our founding fathers were unanimously insistent that Christianity be the basis for our constitutional rights and freedoms–despite a mountain of rock solid evidence to the contrary. In reality,... Read more