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What happened to our minds? Here’s one way of thinking about yourself: you are a big bag of ideas. You carry around billions of them, of every sort, from spiritual to dietary to political to artistic. You have an idea about coffee, about Thai food, about the best time to get up in the morning,..
The Responsibility Divide When a parent is pushed to the extreme by a rebellious teenager and a full-blown, high-volume lecture erupts, I’ve noticed the reaction of the troubled teen falls along a spectrum. The teen will either fight back and make the yelling match more or less even, or they will fall into a kind..
I’m not a lawyer, but.. The general assumption, when it comes to “expertise,” is the notion that if you gather several bona fide “experts” and ask them the same question within their field of study, you will get more or less the same answer. Either the world is getting more and more hopelessly complicated, or..
“not a hair of his head will fall to the ground, for he did this today with God’s help..” My ongoing obsession with righteous disobedience to wicked authority isn’t just the product of my own contrarian, cranky nature. I see it so many times in the Bible that I thought I would begin making an inventory..
Without meaning we are all just brutes. By “meaning” I’m referring to a broad set of mythologies and shared cultural values that collectively drive both individuals and their nations. Societies with shared cultural reference points, like Japan, (family honor, fear of shame, thriftiness, self-denial, bravery) tend to be the kind that can turn a mountain..
As I was claiming yesterday, Christian regeneration absolutely comes with a new set of eyes, and a new heart, and a new way of judging the world. If someone truly comes to believe in the Savior of mankind, that same Savior’s description of the process (being “born again”) means all new spiritual parts, and all new..
The feed just keeps getting more and more weird. One minute we witness Rachel Maddow, unable to control her tears, in what seems like a genuinely felt lamentation about Trump’s 2018 “tender age shelters” for children of illegal immigrants, and the next minute Jeffrey Marsh is playing a gross fake-girl as he celebrates the idea that..
The Purity Thing Again.. Mike Pence is ever-anxious to let you know he’s made a difficult moral decision. He rarely fails to remind his audience he is Christian first, American second, and Republican third. Brimming over with that brand of paraded piety that earned him 0.1% of the primary vote, Mike furls his brow and..
Lots of people I respect, as people of faith and intellect, keep getting Romans 13 completely wrong, so I’ll try one more time… At the outset, this passage (“be subject to the governing authorities”) is likely THE most proof-texted passage in scripture. People trot it out as though absolutely nothing else in the Word qualifies..
You get to govern one of two populations – “Dominion Town” or “Chance Town.” Dominion Town is full of people who believe they are the children of a just and holy God who loves them and has made them in His image. God’s eyes are upon them all the time. If you make them stumble,..
