Iran Negotiations vs. Reality

  

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 »

First Great Awakening: Results

  

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 »

Selma & History

  

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 »

Lewis: Writing to Please the Ear & the Eye

  

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 »

Netanyahu’s Historic Warning

  

Yesterday, while watching Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to a joint session of Congress, I felt as if I were a participant in a historic event of the same stature as Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” and “Tear Down This Wall” speeches. Even as Reagan confronted the evil of totalitarian communism, Netanyahu forcefully focused our attention on the current totalitarian evil of radical Islamism. Reagan succeeded in toppling the Evil Empire and the Wall came down. Will Netanyahu’s speech lead us to a… Read more »

The Clinton Chronicles (cont.)

  

If any of you think you have Clinton nostalgia, might I suggest it’s more likely you are suffering from memory loss? Both Clintons have a track record of money-grubbing, lying, and stonewalling information when they are investigated. Forget, for a moment, the most obvious example of Clinton perifidy—Bill’s continual infidelity and all the activity that led to his impeachment. Forget Hillary’s “loss” of records in the Whitewater fiasco that eventually were “found” in her office after all, once all incriminating… Read more »

The Lewis Humor

  

Walter Hooper, an American who went to visit C. S. Lewis in 1963 unexpectedly grew so close to him that during the summer months he ended up serving as his private secretary. Lewis invited him to return to England in 1964 to take up the position permanently. Lewis’s death in November 1963 seemed to end Hooper’s dream of renewing that role, but he shortly after became the primary literary agent for all of Lewis’s works, a role he has maintained… Read more »