Reflections on God … Man … Life
Shouldn’t one’s history matter? What is it about the history of Bill and Hillary Clinton that would give anyone confidence in their character? I know some people will be upset with me for focusing on that. They will say that policies are what matter, not personal character. Well, I have a lot to say about the policies of both, but I won’t back down on the significance of personal character. It was during Bill’s presidency that we heard the constant… Read more »
Sheldon Vanauken was an American studying in Oxford in the early 1950s. He was supremely pagan in worldview and lifestyle. Then he started reading C. S. Lewis. As a student of literature, he immediately was drawn to Lewis’s Space Trilogy, then began digesting his apologetic works. He decided, since Lewis was at Oxford also, to contact him, and a correspondence between them developed. Lewis dealt with all of Vanauken’s major questions: the uniqueness of Christianity with respect to all other… Read more »
There are days when I don’t want to write a blog. There are days when I wonder why any of us care to try to make a difference in this world. There are days when I am so sick of the hypocrisy in our culture that I have to fight cynicism in my own heart. There are days when racial wranglings and the bitterness and resentments that flow from them make me ill. There are days when I despair that… Read more »
The negotiations with Iran have been as front and center lately as the Hillary Clinton e-mails. As we know, the administration deplored the invitation to Benjamin Netanyahu to speak to the Congress. That speech went well for Netanyahu, not so well for the administration. Netanyahu’s concerns are obvious: the survival of Israel as Iran moves steadily toward a nuclear capability; the fear that these negotiations will lead to disaster for his people because they don’t seem to rule out that… Read more »
In my ongoing American history series, I’ve completed three posts on the First Great Awakening. They have highlighted the people whom God used to bring an awakening to colonial America. William and Gilbert Tennant established the Log College to train ministers; Jonathan Edwards was the theologian of God’s love best known for his sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God; George Whitefield, an itinerant evangelist from Britain, pulled it all together with a series of trips to America,… Read more »
This weekend saw the commemoration of the Selma march in 1965. It was one of those pivotal moments in the struggle for civil rights for blacks in America. This is the kind of commemoration that should be free from modern-day politics, one in which all Americans can point to the positive changes that have been made in American society against racial animus. That is the ideal. The practice was something else. First, it is a shame that Barack Obama should… Read more »
By now, regular readers of this blog know that I like to fill Saturdays with what I’m gleaning from my study of C. S. Lewis. I just completed writing the fourth chapter in my proposed book on Lewis’s impact on Americans. That chapter looks at the relationship between Lewis and Walter Hooper, an American who visited him in 1963 and became his private secretary for a few months before having to return to America. Hooper’s remembrances of his time with… Read more »