Reflections on God … Man … Life
Let’s get down to the basic facts here. Bruce Jenner is still Bruce Jenner. He may call himself Caitlyn, but he’s only given a man a woman’s name. He may look different now, but the changes to his sexuality are external only. Neither is he brave or courageous for doing what he has done, no matter what ESPN decides. In fact, he is going with the flow now, since everyone in the elite circles, including his former wife and his… Read more »
Why did the Stamp Act, passed by the British government in 1765 and scheduled to go into effect the next year, raise such a furor in the American colonies? What was different about this act and how did they respond to it? As we continue our examination of American history, I will begin to tackle that question today. The colonists considered this act poisonous to their liberties. Why? The act itself was a tax on all legal documents, newspapers, playing… Read more »
The year: 1938. The occasion: a meeting between Whittaker Chambers, who had, at great peril, left the American communist underground, and General Walter Krivitsky, a defector from Stalin’s secret police. This meeting was instrumental in helping Chambers decide to inform on his former underground associates, and eventually led to the front-page drama of the Chambers-Hiss controversy from 1948-1950. Chambers was hesitant to talk with Krivitsky. He knew it might lead to that fateful decision that would change the rest of… Read more »
C. S. Lewis’s “God in the Dock” essay exposes one of the biggest obstacles we face in transmitting the Gospel message: the unwillingness of people to acknowledge they are guilty of anything and are in need of a savior. What Lewis says in this essay has become even more conspicuous in our day. He writes of what he learned when he spoke to Royal Air Force (R.A.F.) audiences during WWII. One of the first things he learned was that they… Read more »
There may be those among my readers who are not familiar with the name Tony Campolo. He has been a sociology professor at an evangelical Christian university for many years. I believe he is now about 80 years old and has been in the limelight in evangelical circles for quite some time. In his earlier years, he wrote books that always pushed the envelope with respect to evangelicals’ more conservative view of culture. Then he began to be even more… Read more »
I’m preparing to begin my twenty-seventh year of teaching college this fall. One of the joys I’ve had is the free hand to develop upper-level courses for history majors. Due to all my research on C. S. Lewis this year (and my still-hoped-for book on him), I will be teaching a course on him in the upcoming semester. Lewis and education go together. He had many wise and insightful comments on the aims and limits of education. For a good… Read more »
Most people have never heard of James Otis and the part he played in American history, but he could easily have the title of First Leader of Resistance to the British Tyranny. Here are the facts. The Great Constitutional Debate Period prior to the American Revolution ranged from 1761-1776. It was a unique period in history, very unlike most others, when debate over the proper role of government and the basic rights of the people came to the forefront. Usually,… Read more »