The Joe Biden I “Know”

  

This current generation of voters knows Joe Biden only as Obama’s VP. I’ve been around a lot longer than your average voter (how startling to say that now) and I’ve “known” Joe Biden from the 1980s up to the present. He hasn’t changed with respect to his character: practiced smile while eviscerating a foe (cue the Robert Bork Supreme Court nomination hearings); plagiarist without equal (which led to the demise of one of his presidential runs); teller of tall tales…. Read more »

Only the Scent or Echo of the Real Thing

  

“What does not satisfy when we find it,” wrote C. S. Lewis, “was not the thing we were desiring.” That short statement came in the middle of his first Christian book, The Pilgrim’s Regress, and it summarizes the whole point of the book, wherein the protagonist comes back to the Christian faith that he didn’t desire at the outset of his journey: he finally realizes that what he was running away from was the real thing after all. The book… Read more »

D-Day, Rangers, & Reagan

  

June 6–the 75th anniversary of Operation Overlord, better known as D-Day–the beginning of the liberation of Europe from the Nazis. I do my best in my American history survey course to impress on the students the sacrifices made that day. The current generation has so little sense of history and the impact it still makes on us now. My duty as a professor is to help them see that connection. They have freedom, but it has been bought at a… Read more »

When the Curtain Comes Down on the Play

  

“It seems to me impossible to retain in any recognisable form our belief in the Divinity of Christ and the truth of the Christian revelation,” C. S. Lewis remarked, “while abandoning, or even persistently neglecting, the promised, and threatened, Return.” The world likes Christ’s first coming, His nativity, because we get presents and feel-good Hallmark movies—you know, that amorphous “Christmas spirit” that is bereft of the Christ of Christmas. The Second Coming concept, though, as Lewis notes, is, for some,… Read more »

Bold Steps for Life

  

One of my most adamant public policy positions, based on my Christian beliefs, is the promotion of the pro-life movement. Abortion is one of the most heinous sins, arguably the most heinous, to be found in American society. Along with the normalization of the sin of homosexuality, the very nature of human beings and their interaction with each other has altered fundamentally over the past four decades. I’ve also tempered my deep concern over abortion by advocating whatever incremental measures… Read more »

American Wars: A Retrospective

  

I could have just relaxed today, put up a photo of Memorial Day, and said nothing more. But I thought instead this might be a good opportunity to provide some ponderings on the various wars in which America got involved. Perhaps this is the best way to remember those who sacrificed the most for us all. From the American Revolution to the various manifestations of the War on Terror, here is an abbreviated attempt to offer some thoughts on the… Read more »

This Is the Most Important Issue

  

Most who have read any C. S. Lewis at all are familiar with his oft-quoted Liar-Lunatic-God “trilemma” in Mere Christianity. It exposes the false notion that Jesus can be a great moral teacher while at the same claiming to be God. In a short essay entitled “What Are We to Make of Jesus Christ,” found in God in the Dock, Lewis addresses that subject again, but from a different angle. He begins by showing that Jesus does offer “clear, definite… Read more »