Month: January 2013

Those Executive Orders

  

President Obama yesterday put forward his executive orders for curbing gun violence. There were twenty-three of them. I read through all twenty-three carefully. While I’m somewhat relieved that he didn’t go beyond the regular misuse of such executive orders—no sweeping new mandates this time—he nevertheless stepped over the constitutional boundary that separates the executive from the legislative. His orders, while not establishing new laws, which would be unconstitutional in itself, still added new spending in the billions. Unless that money… Read more »

C. S. Lewis: The Reality of a Belief

  

When C. S. Lewis’s wife Joy died, he went through a crisis of faith. He wrote a book at the time into which he poured out his questions to God. It was called A Grief Observed. This quote is taken from that book, and is part of what he had to learn through this experience. You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is… Read more »

The Giglio Saga: The New Intolerance

  

This week was the first time I had ever heard of Louie Giglio. It’s the first time many Americans heard his name, but now, for those who pay attention to the news, he has become prominent. Here’s why he ought to be prominent: he is a Christian leader whose ministry just drew 60,000 young people to Atlanta for the dual purpose of worshiping God and helping to end the abominable practice of human trafficking—the slavery of our age. He ought… Read more »

Constitutional Limitations & Obama

  

Who cares about constitutional limitations? Certainly not Barack Obama. He likes to let people know he was a professor of constitutional law, but the truth is that 1) he was a lecturer, not a professor per se, and 2) he has no regard for the document at all. He’s referred to it as an encumbrance that gets in the way of his goal of transforming America. As I noted yesterday, and as at least some of the media have picked… Read more »

Media Distortion & the Christian Response

  

Last week I wrote about the main problems I see in the church today, and why Christians aren’t making as much of an impact on the culture as we should be. I wanted to be sure we understand that’s where the greatest blame lies. We must always examine ourselves before pointing fingers elsewhere. Sometimes we can be our own worst enemy, but there are other times when deliberate distortion of Biblical positions and those who espouse them takes center stage…. Read more »

Lewis: The Atheist Dilemma

  

C. S. Lewis had to make the journey from atheism to Christianity. In his book Mere Christianity, he explains how he came up against the lack of logic in his atheistic position: [When I was an atheist] my argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was… Read more »

The Abandonment of Biblical Education

  

I’ve been cataloging the biggest failures of the church in our day, beginning with a watered-down salvation message, then on to our lack of renewed minds when it comes to putting the faith into practice, allowing worldly thinking to dominate. There’s one more leg on the three-legged stool of failure—the abandonment of Biblical education. In early America, most education was centered in the church or home, and the lion’s share of the home-schooled portion of society was Christian also. That… Read more »