Tag: evil

The Chambers Lesson: From the Negative to the Positive

  

I discovered Witness by Whittaker Chambers back in the 1980s as I was working diligently on my doctorate in history. From my first reading, the book took hold of my spirit. More than thirty years after that encounter, it has never released its hold. I’ve used it in classes since the late 1980s, and one of my greatest teaching joys is to offer a full-semester course called “The Witness of Whittaker Chambers.” I’m teaching the course once again this semester…. Read more »

Abortion: Calling Evil Good

  

The state of New York, long established as one of the most liberal in the nation, has now, in its progressive wisdom, decided that abortion is not only a right, but one that can be carried out up to the point of a baby’s delivery. One second, you have a living, vibrant child ready to come out of the womb to enter this world of woe; in the next second, you have a dead baby, killed by an abortionist (who… Read more »

The Cultural Shift & the Christian Response

  

When we lived in the northern Virginia suburbs in the 1980s, we sent our children to Christian schools because we wanted an environment for them that supported our beliefs. Training up a child in the way he/she should go is a requirement for Christian parents. One of the schools we entrusted with our children for a few years was Immanuel Christian School. While no Christian school is perfect (indeed, can we find a perfect anything in this world?), we were… Read more »

Evil Is a Parasite, Not an Original Thing

  

One could argue, quite convincingly, I think, that every sin is simply something good being misused. Food is for our good and we are to eat; gluttony is the misuse of what was meant to be good. Sex is a gift of God provided as both a means to create unity between husband and wife as well as for procreation. Yet we see what it has become—a complete perversion of God’s intent. As I’ve been going through Mere Christianity with… Read more »

Chambers: Why the Christians Are Right & the Heathen Are Wrong

  

Here’s the scenario: the culture is in decline due to a loss of Biblical principles; beliefs based on those principles that used to hold the society together are attacked as bigoted, narrow, and intolerant; the government is increasingly dysfunctional and policies, despite the best efforts of honest and caring representatives, move further away from Biblical norms. What’s someone to do about this, especially when one feels called by God (to some, that’s a rather presumptive and/or arrogant statement right there)… Read more »

Our Own Version of Newspeak

  

I read George Orwell’s classic novel 1984 way back sometime in my youth. Orwell, a socialist who saw the potential tyranny of socialism (read his Animal Farm for a withering treatment of Soviet-style communism under Stalin), displayed in 1984 just how bad it could get. One of the words he introduced in the novel was Newspeak. It has now become part of our vocabulary. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the term this way: Propagandistic language marked by euphemism, circumlocution, and the… Read more »

A Baptized Imagination

  

The first book to analyze C. S. Lewis and his popularity was written by an American, Chad Walsh, an English professor at Beloit College in Wisconsin. It came out in 1949 with the title C. S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics. Walsh had Lewis to thank for his own conversion. “In my case there was no childhood faith,” Walsh wrote in an account of how he eventually found the Christian path. “If I ever believed in God as a small… Read more »