Christ, The Word, The Church, The Republic
Al Franken, Lust, and Public Scrutiny I was a guest at a “great man’s” home in Newport Beach years ago. The man, (we will call him “Charlie”), had just returned from a wedding, and he was amused by an awkward toast given by a friend. “So there he is,” Charlie observed, laughing at his memory,..
Women Do Lie, Folks.. Shortly after the birth of my first child, I became passionately and adamantly pro-life. For me this meant I was passionately anti-abortion as well. I was in my late twenties, even more unsparing in my rhetoric than I am now, and excited to have a place on CompuServe discussion groups where..
We tend to get better at the easy, largely technical stuff. We do our math homework first, and then settle in for a long frustrating night of trying our hand at a sonnet. There’s a reason the movies you watch these days seem 90% CGI, 8% sex and 2% soul: Beautiful people are cheap; photo-realistic..
Agents of Wrath As I’ve tried to explore recently, most of us have not gouged out our eyes and cut off our hands. I know Christians who have sold houses and fields and lands, but it’s usually to buy another set of houses and fields, with a little something extra for that mission trip to..
Picture a baseball stadium full of Hasidim — somber faced, bearded men wearing black hats and frock coats. Their hair, by our standards, appears both a little ragged and severely uniform at the same time. Shaved close above the ears and in the back and then allowing for long, curled sideburns in front, (what they..
All Souls Day “Look out the window,” my wife said. It was a Sunday afternoon. I had my dates mixed up, and there was an early evening Halloween party in the works. All of the Riley grandchildren and cousins and little people friends were gathering for a hayride. I’m telling you it was a grand..
How sacrificial, really, are most of us? I rarely work out on Sunday, but I felt the need to balance out a little Fall Saturday gluttony, and I used my elliptical time to check in with a pastor I haven’t seen in years — David Jeremiah of Shadow Mountain Community Church. I faith-channel-surfed a little..
The Age of the Image Anyone else think it strange, or at least inadequately considered, that Hugh Hefner should receive a loving pop-culture send-off upon his death, just about a week before the news cycle was flooded with Harvey Weinstein’s tale of epic sexual harassment? On the one hand, we were invited to ponder Hefner’s..
Decent Folks Correct Their Children As I’ve written before, I firmly believe that racism is officially over in the United States, but that only applies to reasonably normal people. There is, in fact, an approved, coddled and utterly “unchained” kind of racism out there, and it flows at fire-hydrant volume from people who have been..
In a stunning theological development, pastor and “Desiring God” teacher John Piper has come to the conclusion that God is just not “big enough” to solve race problems. Employing his usual amorphous, affable and directionless prose, and employing the phrase ‘I don’t know’ for earnest emphasis three separate times, Piper admitted that race is just..
