“In Buddhism no creator,” says the Dalai Lama during a public conversation with Archbishop Desmond Tutu recounted in The Wisdom of Compassion: Stories of Remarkable Encounters and Timeless Insights by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Victor Chan, recently abridged and published by the Huffington Post. It typifies the contributions the spiritual leader of Tibet makes, all of which raise questions. … Continue Reading »
Yoram Hazony, author of The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, recently wrote a provocative opinion article for the New York Times in which he summarized his skepticism toward the idea of a perfect God. Hazony suggests that there are two compelling reasons why the God of classical theism should be rejected … Continue Reading »
David Attenborough”famous for hosting BBC’s The Living Planet and other nature documentaries”has recently drawn headlines for lambasting humans as a “plague on the Earth.” That someone of Attenborough’s stature (he has been knighted, among other official honors, and is so popular in the U.K. that he was named one the One-Hundred Greatest Britons in a 2002 BBC poll) would compare us to cholera evidences how mainstream anti-humanism has become within the environmental movement… . Continue Reading »
Patrick Deneen is right to have raised questions over several years about whether American liberal democracy is sustainable. He’s not, of course, the first to do so. Conservatives, maybe beginning with Edmund Burke, have often understood liberalism as a kind of self-obsessive individualism that has the potential to consume the social and relational institutions that make human life worth living. Liberalism contains the seeds of its own destruction… . Continue Reading »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 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 »
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