Isn’t that just like God. Nearly as soon as I wrote last week’s blog, ”Raise the Level of Discourse” Barack Obama gave his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast. God, it seems, gave me the opportunity to go back on what I wrote (in my flesh I would love to do that) or ignore the speech (which may be the coward’s way out) or comment on the issues and reserve any personal attacks. Hopefully, God will grant me success in doing the latter.

At a religious event like the National Prayer Breakfast, it seems appropriate to comment on spiritual issues and it often reveals ones worldview as they handle or mishandle the sacred texts of the group to whom one is speaking. This is true in the case of Barack Obama and this speech. As we have documented in our article, Barack and the Borg , for twenty years he attended a church that is steeped in Black Liberation Theology. Anthony B. Bradley’s article, The Marxist Roots of Black Liberation Theology defines and comments on the origins and implications of the theological view which Obama has been steeped in for over twenty years so I won’t spend much time on that here other than to say, it is this life centered and has little to do with our relationship to God or the person and work of Jesus Christ. This may sound odd since Obama stated in the speech: Continue reading …

A second matter, in this regard, concerns the strong indications that for all the deep belief, the genuine piety, the heroic faith, and the good intention one finds all across American Christianity today, large swaths have been captured by the spirit of the age. One does not have to review or redo the research of many social scientists to recognize the extent of this challenge. Consumerism, individualism, the therapeutic and managerial ideologies have gone far to undermine the authority of the Christian movement and its traditions. This problem is especially acute among the young, where, as Christian Smith observes, a “moralistic, therapeutic deism” has triumphed over historical creedal faith and practice.

As Jonathon and I work our way through James Davison Hunter’s book, To Change the World : The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World , we are finding a number of things with which we agree. In fact, we have made similar observations which are similar to the above quote from his book. I do have to say that, although he states he is writing as a Christian, it is unclear what he means by that claim. He seems Continue reading …

Is the celebration of the national holiday called Thanksgiving a time of reflection and thanksgiving or merely the sound of the starting pistol in the race for buying stuff? The answers to this question vary and will be wide ranging. For some these days will be very difficult. I received news early on Thanksgiving Day that a friend’s husband had unexpectedly passed away earlier that morning. The season will be difficult for the family even though they are believers. A few days earlier a friend of my daughter and son-in-law was rushed to the hospital with a heart attack. He is about 40 and to the best of our knowledge, not a believer. We do not know yet if he will survive.

For some the holiday is one of a series of firsts. My mother passed away this year, as did Joy’s older brother and my sister’s husband. For us and other members of our families, this was the first Thanksgiving without someone who was special to us. For those of us who are believers and whose family members whom have passed from this life were believers, we have our feet firmly planted both in the present and the future. While we grieve we recognize that our current feeling of loss is temporary and for that we are thankful. The Apostle Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18: Continue reading …

There have been a lot of “I” statements going around the internet lately. Lots of celebrities holding up signs with various statements written (often illegibly) on plain sheets of paper and photographed with camera phones.

Some of these may actually be real and not Photoshopped. Continue reading …

A friend sent me this little picture which many of their left leaning friends are putting in their emails and posting to their Facebook accounts. It demonstrates a lack of biblical literacy and a substitution of socialism for biblically based Christianity. I am not saying that they may not have genuine compassion on those in need but they do not have a biblically informed view of how to address the problem. It assumes that somewhere in Scripture there is teaching that it is the unbelieving, secular government’s responsibility to take resources from those who are working, investing, building businesses and yes, supporting charities of their own choice and redistribute it to others of the government’s choice. If true, the passage would sound something like this:

For I was hungry, and you didn’t allow the government to continue expanding the food stamp program for Me; I was thirsty,  and you tried to get alcohol and cigarettes removed from the food stamp program; I was on taxpayer funded welfare and you expected Me to get a job. I incurred college debt and you expected that I would keep my word and pay my debts.

Obviously, I could go on but you get the idea. This is a mentality that has been the hallmark of the cry-baby boomer generation. In the very insightful article, Listen Up, Boomers: The Backlash Has Begun, after describing the accomplishments of the generation preceding the cry-baby boomers, Walter Russell Mead writes: Continue reading …

Well, it was only a matter of time that the Occupy Wall Street crowd would drag Jesus into there amorphous angst. I found this picture on one of my friend’s “wall” on Facebook. Of course I had to get involved. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know about Occupy Wall Street. What you know about their demands may be very little. Though a list of demands has been voted on and posted, this statement seems accurate:

There are no Official Demands of the Occupy Movement. that being said, multiple factions of the movement have been assembling to discuss and vote on the output and message for the movement. Below is a LIST OF PROPOSED “DEMANDS FOR CONGRESS” proposed by the website (occupywallstreet.org) which does not entirely represent the Occupy Wall Street General Assembly.

Fair enough. When you look the demands of the coalition of the outraged Continue reading …

I was talking with my partner in crime, Jonathon Miles, about this week’s blog and he mentioned a quote that C.S. Lewis had made about having first things first. In my trolling the Internet in search of the quote I stumbled across something that combined the quote with issues of social justice at, of all places, First Things.

Over on Catholic World News, a fellow who goes by the name of Uncle Di reflects on the way that clerics in recent decades have abandoned revealed truth and saving souls in favor of sundry causes of social justice. He recalls a 1942 essay by C.S. Lewis, “First and Second Things.” Lewis wrote: “To sacrifice the greater good for the less and then not to get the lesser good after all–that is the surprising folly. . . Every preference of a small good to a great, or a partial good to a total good, involves the loss of the small or partial good for which the sacrifice was made. Apparently the world is made that way. If Esau really got his pottage in return for his birthright, then Esau was a lucky exception. You can’t get second things by putting them first; you can get second things only by putting first things first.”

Ultimately, that is the dilemma Continue reading …