Tag: Founding Fathers

Phrases in Need of Context

I’ve never been one to jump on bandwagons of trendy phrases and slogans. I’m not going to start now. I don’t care if they emanate from political Left field or political Right field. I avoid them all. Instead, I think it’s important to explain matters cogently and with the proper context, tossing aside phrases that create certain images in people’s minds that may not be accurate. As much as possible, I always want to provide both theological and historical context… Read more »

John Jay: Christian Statesman

How about a little wisdom from one of America’s Founders today? Most people are not too familiar with John Jay, but he was central to almost every major event of the Founding. Jay served in the Continental Congress, was one of the principal leaders in the debates leading to Independence, was elected president of Congress at one point, and was appointed one of the peace commissioners who negotiated the end of the American Revolution. Afterwards, he, along with James Madison… Read more »

Constitution Day at SEU: Religious Liberty & Social Justice

On September 17, 1787, thirty-nine men put their signatures on a document intended to chart a course for the future of the fairly new United States of America. Each year, we commemorate that event as we celebrate one of the best set of by-laws ever created by a nation. At Southeastern, we always seek to use that commemoration to help students, faculty, and staff appreciate more fully what these men did, as they labored over the concepts and wording to… Read more »

Little Men Who Think They Are Big

The view that the people, as a collective, are always right is fallacious. The voters make huge mistakes all the time. Yet so do kings and totalitarian rulers. What, then, is the solution? Our Founders came up with an arrangement that sought to minimize the sinfulness and foolishness of man. The federal republic they created, while not perfect, since there is no perfect system in this world, nevertheless has the potential to diminish the bad effects of man’s selfish tendencies…. Read more »

Constitutional Limitations & Obama

Who cares about constitutional limitations? Certainly not Barack Obama. He likes to let people know he was a professor of constitutional law, but the truth is that 1) he was a lecturer, not a professor per se, and 2) he has no regard for the document at all. He’s referred to it as an encumbrance that gets in the way of his goal of transforming America. As I noted yesterday, and as at least some of the media have picked… Read more »

Educating a New Generation

The Fourth of July used to be one of the premier American holidays. People celebrated it because they understood the principles behind the resistance to taxation without representation and the potential for government overreach. Those were lessons we used to know. Things have changed. But if you were to take a survey of our current knowledge of America’s founding and the principles upon which it was based, you might get a variety of responses, few of them heartening: If some… Read more »

President Absent

The Founders set up three co-equal branches of government. They presumed the initiative would rest with the legislative branch, which would determine the laws. The executive branch’s duty was primarily to carry out those laws. Throughout our early history, most of the presidents recognized that distinction; rarely did one come to the office with a broad agenda. That doesn’t mean we didn’t have forceful presidents at times. Washington, just by his stature, brought stability to the new nation. Jackson sought… Read more »