On boys, and not failing to launch
As singer Brian Sauvé wrote of his song Old Neptune, He’s Roaring, “I wrote this… for my boys: Ari, Ira, Cyril, and Alfred. It’s a call to go and run the race to win the prize, to do what Paul urged in Romans 2, to live for glory and immortality through the Lord Jesus Christ. It’s for your sons, too.”
N.T. Wright gets it wrong on abortion and the unborn
A recent public gaffe by this famous Christian intellectual highlights how few seem to understand the basic argument for the unborn’s worth. Even the linked article, by two great Christian thinkers, John Stonestreet and Shane Morris, only gets it right in part. Yes, it is wrong to kill any innocent human being, but why? What makes a tiny human being of the same value as a big one? From where do we get our worth, and from where do we get this notion of equality? The secular world has no answer. But Christians know that there is one thing we all share, and in equal measure. What sets us apart from the animals, but not the unborn, is that we are all made in the very Image of God (Gen. 9:6).
It’s this foundational truth that N.T. Wright forgot, and that many other pro-lifers neglect as well. But it is this distinctly Christian point that is the only foundation for equality, and in raising it we highlight the antithesis – God’s truth vs. the world’s emptiness – to the glory of God.
So ridiculous, it has to be God
A husband whose wife has had to endure 98 surgeries shares how, in the midst of the craziness, they’ve been reassured that,
“God is good.
“Christ is near.
“Grace is sufficient.
“Even when nothing else makes sense.
“Maybe especially then.”
An amazing, encouraging story…
God’s guidelines for sex aren’t arbitrary
This is a longer read, but it might shake how you think not only about sex, but how you think about politics, and conversations over the office cooler. Trevin Wax talks of sin as “our hearts bending inward, turning away from God.”
“The Latin phrase is incurvatus in se – a curving in on ourselves, where we grasp for God’s blessings but push away God himself.”
Does that not strike you as the popular Christian, Jordan Peterson-esque approach to public debate? We try to teach our world about how they can get some of the blessings of God by following His laws – turning away from pornography, envy, and adultery are all good for us and for our society – even as we pitch it to them completely separate of God Himself. It’s what we do because we think our world isn’t interested to hear what God has to say.
But Trevin Wax seems to call this sin!
The massive lies ChatGPT might be telling you
A longer read, but this real conversation with ChatGPT takes increasingly bizarre turns. Even if you’ve regularly catching ChatGPT lying to you, this’ll be the eye-opener!
Would you rather be colonized by Aztecs or Christians?
“The right of conquest” is the centuries-old (and longer than even that) notion that if a country conquers and manages to hold an area of land for a length of time it should then be understood as theirs. But many are rightly suspicious of this tradition, and Christians should be in particular, because this tradition runs right up against the 8th Commandment. Or, it would require the commandment be modified such that it says “Do not steal… unless you are bigger and stronger and can hold onto what you’ve stolen for at least so long.”
But if we don’t like that kind of modification, we should also object to another alteration that’s been proposed, though never explicitly: “Thou shall not steal what I stole.” As Michael Knowles highlights in this video, we’re all immigrants and “colonizers,” even including the tribes that were supplanted. As Nathaniel T. Jeanson also highlights in his They Had Names: Tracing the History of North American Indigenous People, tribes fought against tribes, and one supplanted the next. In a very real sense, there are no original owners to give the land back to.
Does that mean that it’s okay then, to have taken land from the tribes that were here before? No. But it does recast them as, not simply victims, but also victimizers – what was done to them, their ancestors did to others to gain this same land. Let’s get that into the land acknowledgements we hear so often:
“Before we begin, I’d just like to acknowledge we are on the traditional hunting grounds of the — tribe, who took these grounds from the —- tribe, who in turn took them from other tribes, and so on, down through time immemorial….”
Where does that leave us with treaty negotiations? I don’t know, but I do know more honesty is better than less. If it is wrong for the Western world to have taken what they would by force of arms, then it is no less wrong when it was done by the tribes who were here before us.
