The world only works when life is held as precious. Each of us wants to live more than we want to die. We are overwhelmed by the longing to not die, and consumed with the desire to go on living. A thousand times a day we make subconscious choices that preserve our lives. We brake…
It is terrible but true—sexual predators target churches. In the mind of a predator, a church offers a compelling target and, too often, an easy target. I recently worked my way through On Guard by Deepak Reju and learned that there are at least 6 reasons why sexual predators specifically target churches. Christians Are Naïve…
Sadly, my time at the Inerrancy Summit has drawn to a close. Because of other commitments, I was only able to give it two days, but I am very grateful for the time I was able to spend there, and was delighted to meet so many of those who attended. As I wait for my…
Why should you care about the Inerrancy Summit? There are, after all, hundreds of conferences every year, and it can be difficult to distinguish between them. Well, if for no other reason, you should care about this summit because there are almost 5,000 people here this week, most of them church leaders, representing 70 different…
John MacArthur’s Inerrancy Summit begins today, and I couldn’t be more excited. Yesterday I hopped a flight from Toronto to Los Angeles so I could be a part of it or, at least, so I could do a bit of writing about it. While I do not intend to provide live-blogging, I will certainly be…
We are witnesses today to a massive culture shift. Things we used to hold sacred are now subject to mockery; evils we would never even have dreamed of are now regarded as normal and beautiful. And everywhere we look, Christians are on the front lines—whether they like it or not, they are on the front…
The trailer is smoldering temptingly on computers around the globe. Fans of the book are checking their diaries and booking tickets online. Reviewers are readying their pens and preparing their remarks. In just a few short days 50 Shades of Grey will hit the big screen, just in time for Valentine’s Day. On one level,…
For millennia, human beings have looked to the night skies and grappled with their own insignificance. It is difficult to feel big and important when looking at thousands and millions of stars stretching far beyond our gaze and far beyond our comprehension. King David’s experience is one most of us have shared. When I look…
We have just witnessed the greatest entertainment launch in human history, though I suspect few of us noticed. We remember the buzz around James Cameron’s Avatar which quickly became the highest-grossing film of all time, raking in over $2 billion since its 2009 debut. Well, last week Grand Theft Auto V, a video game, put…
We are regularly exposed to tragedy. Sometimes these are tragedies played out on a television screen thousands or tens of thousands of miles away and other times they are tragedies in our neighborhoods or our local churches. Strangely, some tragedies on the far side of the world make indelible impressions upon us while tragedies next…
I am rather a skeptic when it comes to many of the claims of global warming and environmentalism. However, this skepticism about the prognostications of doom and gloom does not indicate that I am unconcerned about the planet we live on. It is quite the opposite, really. I want my skepticism to allow me to…
The American presidential election is almost upon us (even those of us who do not live in the United States) and one of the contentious issues in this election, as with most elections today, regards the distribution of wealth and the inequality of possessions. Is it right that the wealthy should have wealth taken from…
When Abby Johnson quit her job in 2009, it became national news. Johnson was director of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Texas and did not merely quit her job, but also changed sides in the abortion battle. Formerly an employee of the organization that performs more abortions than any other, she had come to believe…
I went to bed at 10:05 last night, and wouldn’t you know it, my site went down at 10:10 (or so I learned in the morning). I’ve had to dedicate some time this morning to trying to resurrect it. At this point it seems a little bit stable–stable enough to try to post this. However,…
Norway has experienced a nightmare—3 hours of abject terror. On Friday afternoon, right around 3:30, thirty-two year-old Anders Behring Breivik ignited a bomb outside government offices in Oslo, killing at least 7. As the bomb exploded, he was on his way to Utoya Island, about 20 miles from Oslo, the location of a youth camp…
The introduction of a new communications technology tends to bring with it an inevitable challenge of grappling with new rules of etiquette. This was true in the time of the telegraph when, for example, business owners had to decide whether or not they would receive work-related telegraphs at their homes after business hours. This was…
There is a new documentary causing quite a lot of buzz today. It is called Orgasm, Inc. and it looks at the strange but inevitable collision of the pharmaceutical industry with women’s sexuality. Liz Canner uses this film to display the sad reality that pharmaceutical companies play a crucial role in shaping the diseases they…
The issue of homosexuality is one in which the church has not done so well over the years. The majority of Christians have long held fast to the clear teaching of Scripture–that homosexuality is against God’s plan for the people he created and that homosexuality is a serious sin, one that manifests a particular hardness…
What is a true woman? How does a woman earn that one-word descriptor of true? It occurs to me today that as a culture we really have no hope of answering the question. After all, we have trouble defining a woman, not to mention a true woman. In today’s A La Carte post I shared…
Over the past few weeks I spent a good deal of time studying the life of General Stonewall Jackson. He is one of the more complex individuals I’ve studied–a man who had a strong sense of God’s sovereignty yet was something of a hypochondriac, a man who exhibited a great deal of Christian character who…