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Gordon College Wins—and Loses?

President Lindsay of Gordon College is a great guy and Gordon is an important evangelical institution of higher learning. I'm delighted that the Administration and Board of Gordon College has not eliminated a prohibition of “homosexual practice” from its Life and Conduct Statement in the face of an unwarranted accreditation attack.Nevertheless, the present situation does not appear to me to be as rosy as David French (a lawyer who has advised President Lindsay and Gordon College) depicted it in his May 1 National Review online article, “Gordon College Keeps Its Faith and Its Accreditation.”French declares that “Gordon prevailed against a dangerous threat and secured an important victory for religious liberty and academic freedom…. In its moment of crisis, Gordon doubled down on faith. May other Christians under cultural fire do the same.” Continue Reading »

Smearing Sexual Orientation Change

Yesterday I had the good pleasure to join a courageous group of people for a conference entitled “Transformation Potential” held at the Emmanuel Centre in London. The conference was spearheaded by Michael Davidson, a man of God who came out of the homosexual life many years ago and heads up a . . . . Continue Reading »

Richard John Neuhaus

The biography is out. Richard John ­Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square was researched and written by Randy ­Boyagoda. It was a five-year project, including time spent in New York interviewing Neuhaus’s friends and colleagues, digging into his extensive correspondence and archival . . . . Continue Reading »

Read the Law

There is an op-ed in the Washington Post this morning by Apple CEO Tim Cook. It bears the heated title “Pro-discrimination ‘religious freedom’ laws are dangerous.” It’s a solemn warning of looming bias in America, the result of the spread of “religious liberty” legislation that will allow people to deny access and services to people on the spurious grounds of religious belief. Continue Reading »

Willing Incompatible Worlds

To find the words that describe with accuracy the media hysterics involved with Indiana’s passing of a Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) may be impossible. The sanctimonious moral preening offered via social media from such figures as Apple’s Tim Cook and the historically amnesiatic Hillary Clinton are both laughable and inexcusable for their dedication to spreading flavor-of-the-moment distortions. Continue Reading »

Why San Francisco's City Church is Wrong About Sex

The senior pastor and elders of City Church, identified as the largest evangelical church in San Francisco, will no longer require members to abstain from homosexual practice, so long as the homosexual activity occurs in the context of marriage. According to a letter written by senior pastor Fred Harrell on behalf of the Board of Elders, “We will no longer discriminate based on sexual orientation and demand lifelong celibacy as a precondition for joining. For all members, regardless of sexual orientation, we will continue to expect chastity in singleness until marriage.”“Our pastoral practice of demanding life-long ‘celibacy,' by which we meant that for the rest of your life you would not engage your sexual orientation in any way, was causing obvious harm and has not led to human flourishing,” the letter said. Continue Reading »

Harry V. Jaffa's Call for Liberation

Perhaps the most heatedly denounced work of a distinguished scholar is Harry Jaffa’s occasional writing on homosexuality. The passions surrounding the issue distort understanding of these essays, but his purpose in them follows that of the rest of his mature corpus—the recovery of natural right and the great intertwined questions of reason and revelation. Jaffa’s writings on the topic need to be approached from the moral-political perspective from which they were intended. Continue Reading »

While We’re At It

• I am not Charlie. I am not a trickster or prankster. I do not think freedom is based on mockery and transgression. I do not believe that a culture of freedom is nourished by the conceit that nothing is sacred. • Charlie Hebdo reflects a self-­complimenting nihilism. It claims the . . . . Continue Reading »

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