I became a Christian in college. Perhaps in a future blog I will talk about how that happened, but right now that is not important. What is important is that soon after I became a Christian, I was discipled by members of a Southern Baptist campus ministry known as the Baptist Student Union (BSU). They were the ones who taught me what it was to be a Christian and how I could grow stronger in my faith. It is not... Read more
A few weeks ago this article was brought to my attention. So basically at UC-Davis the administrators were perfectly willing to write up an anti-discrimination policy that allowed Christians to face discrimination. Does that make sense to you? Not to me either. But by all means read the article. That is what these administrators wanted to do. They wanted an anti-discrimination policy with basically a “carve-out” so that discrimination against Christians was legal. I guess the story ends well. Due... Read more
So last week I learned a new term. That term is incel. Evidently it indicates a certain group of men who are involuntarily celibate. There are online incel communities with their own values and terminology. My awareness of this community is tied to the realization that Alek Minassian, the suspect in the Toronto truck attack, is part of this community. This has brought the community to light as we try to understand the motivations behind this tragedy. More context is... Read more
There has been a hurricane of changes over the past decade or so as it concerns acceptance of sexual minorities. It was not that long ago that acceptance of sexual minorities was not very strong in any sector of our society – except among those sexual minorities themselves. Now all the information I have seen indicates that such acceptance is growing in all sectors of our society. Because this change has happened so fast, I am not sure we have... Read more
In a post-Christian society I am going to occasionally blog about building the Christian community. This is simply because I think we as Christians have to rethink our position in society. While community has always been important for us, I am convinced that it will be even more important for us in the near and distant future. Thinking about what that community should look like can help us to deliberately construct that community in ways that will be healthy for... Read more
Let me tell you a story. There was a man and a woman who were married. They were married for 15 years. But it was a horrible marriage. The husband was very abusive to his wife. His abuse was mental, physical and even sexual. The wife withstood this horrible situation for as long as she could. At the end of those 15 years, she told him that their marriage was at an end. The husband realized how awful he had... Read more
A disclaimer is in order. I consider myself a moderate on issues of gun control. What I mean is that I favor changes in our gun control laws to make it harder for criminals get them, but I am under no illusion that such measures will have a big effect on crime. Because of my moderate position I am often irritated by both the push by the NRA to fight any reasonable restriction and the gun control nuts who see... Read more
For the first fifteen years or so as an academic, I focused on research that dealt with race and ethnicity. Then about eight years ago I published my last research based on racial issues and began to study anti-Christian bias in the United States. But even though I no longer did original research on race, I have still been in demand to speak on racial issues. Because of this I have continued to think about those issues and will continue... Read more
So what do we know about the sordid affair of Stormy Daniels? We have plenty of reasons to believe that President Trump paid the porn actress $130,000 to keep their sexual encounters silent. There is some evidence that she faced physical threats due to the need to keep her silent as well. Some may argue that she was paid off so that she would not be a nuisance to Trump but does anyone seriously doubt the willingness of Trump to... Read more
I was looking over the data from the Pew study on the changing religious landscape in our country. Evangelicals had decreased as a percentage of the population from 26.3 percent of the population in 2007 to 25.4 percent of the population in 2014. Clearly as one who holds to evangelical theology (but not to their current political instincts), that is not good news. It is not such a decrease that it is inevitable that evangelicals are doomed to collapse as... Read more
Shattering Paradigms
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