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Battles are Ugly When Women Fight

In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Father Christmas issues weapons to the Pevensie children. Peter receives a sword and a shield, Susan receives a bow and arrow and a magical horn that will summon help whenever it’s blown, and Lucy receives a dagger and a magic vial that restores the health of anyone injured… . Continue Reading »

Bless Those Who Persecute You

In recent days my students in my Bible courses have had to endure numerous references to my children as I’ve used them as examples: Just like I speak to little Hans and Miriam in simple ways they can understand, and avoid topics for which they’re not ready, so God does with the human race. He accommodates his revelation to us, brings us along slowly… . Continue Reading »

Has American Fiction Lost Sight of God?

In an article in the New York Times Book Review last month, Paul Elie ponders why Christian belief figures, “as something between a dead language and a hangover,” in current fiction. He observes that the literary heirs of Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy are strangely absent from the present class of MFA-credentialed young novelists now in vogue. And while Elie is right that it is a strange development, he misdiagnoses the reasons why… . Continue Reading »

Pro-Life Rising, Forty Years after Roe v. Wade

Forty years ago, on Jan. 22, 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down Roe v. Wade, one of the two worst decisions in its history. The court’s first mega-error, the 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, declared an entire class of human beings beyond the protection of the laws; Roe v. Wade declared another class of human beings, the unborn, beyond legal protection… . Continue Reading »

Marching for Life

I am unable to forget the “March for Women’s Lives” held on a beautiful D.C. Sunday in April 2004. Its Orwellian event title referring to aborting mothers not unborn females: As the Indigo Girls sang and Whoopi Goldberg held up her coat-hanger, one of the largest banners in the crowd of thousands read “Pro-Life is to Christianity as al-Qaeda is to Islam.” … Continue Reading »

On the Necessity of Theological Courage in the Public Square

On the subject of religious controversy, 2013 started off with a bang, not a whimper. Hobby Lobby, the craft chain owned by a Christian couple, chose to defy the odious HHS mandate pioneered by the administration of President Barack Obama. This edict seeks to bring religious groups to heel by requiring all employers to cover contraception and abortifacients in their health-care plans. For its defiance, Hobby Lobby faces atmospheric fines of $1.3 million dollars per day… . Continue Reading »

The Morality of Modern Cycling

Last week, in an interview with Oprah, Lance Armstrong admitted what everybody already knew: that he took performance-enhancing drugs during his cycling career. Last year, the head of USADA (United States Anti-Doping Association) stated that under Armstrong’s direction the U.S. Postal Cycling Team “ran the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen.” … Continue Reading »

From the February First Things: ‘Sex in the Meritocracy’

When Yale first bowed to the spirit of meritocracy and began admitting large numbers of students from outside the New England upper class, it set in motion a nationwide arms race among high-achieving high school students. After fifty years of escalating competition, it is no longer enough to have an SAT score in the top 1 percent and a record of achievement in a single activity… . Continue Reading »

Men of Steel and Flesh

Since Thetis dipped Achilles in the Styx, men (especially men) have dreamed hot dreams of invulnerability. The Greeks kept dreaming, but they knew these dreams couldn’t come true. Even Achilles”best of the Achaeans, half divine and a tornado of destruction in his aristeia, his moment of glory”this Achilles dies a pathetic death, ambushed and pierced by an arrow at his one narrow point of weakness. A heel of flesh marks the great gulf fixed between the glory of mortals and that of the immortal gods … Continue Reading »

Shrug Not

In a post at CNN’s Belief Blog, a young Evangelical urged Christians to “shrug off” the fact that an Evangelical pastor was apparently disinvited by the President’s Inaugural Committee to pray at the inauguration because of his Christian convictions on sexual morality. We disagree. … Continue Reading »

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