Recently I was sitting at a table in the food court of our local shopping mall. As I looked over the court and watched the mall’s denizens, I wondered what America’s Founders would have thought of it all. Of course, when you put the question that way, you think first of what they would think … [Read more…]
Premise: Christians believe that God wants us to love one another and, even prior to that, to love Him; salvation also requires that we accept Jesus Christ as divine. See, e.g., John 3:16-18 and 14:6. Now, it is commonly argued that it seems very unfair that someone who leads a good life, full of selfless … [Read more…]
There are of course many valuable truths and insights that are not found in the Bible. There’s not a word in it, for example, about the Pythagorean Theorem. And the fact that the Bible contains many valuable truths and insights is not proof that it is Scripture. Poor Richard’s Almanac is not Scripture, for example. … [Read more…]
I had the thought that is the subject of this blogpost the other day, and I’m not sure it is really God-related. But perhaps there is some connection to, say, Genesis 3:16 (NLT), and in all events it may be evidence of Providence in the way God made them male and female. Anyhow, here goes: … [Read more…]
Maybe it’s formulaic but it’s also true, in my humble opinion: All we have to do is accept Christ and try our best to do what He wants.
My wife and I one recent evening felt like watching a movie, and she loves romantic comedies and I had a list from the February 23, 2009, National Review of the “25 best conservative movies of the last 25 years.” And so we rented Blast from the Past for 79 cents. That 79 cents turned … [Read more…]
Driving during a cold sunset in December, I was overwhelmed with so many sublime intricacies in the landscape, natural and manmade both. It beggars the imagination to think this could all be accidental, just molecules colliding. But, one hesitates, does it not also beggar the imagination to think that this could all be known and … [Read more…]
So, on this first day of September, consider this challenge, gentle reader: As you sit there, pick up any object near to hand, and see if it does not contain in it something to strike wonder in you. A wooden pencil? Consider then a tree. Consider also how complicated the manufacture of a pencil is. … [Read more…]
I read once — maybe in a biography of T.E. Lawrence — that it’s no accident that the three great monotheistic religions were born in or near deserts, since that landscape’s sky-filled starkness underscores human limitations and draws one’s thoughts to the eternal, or something like that. A beach does that even more, since the … [Read more…]
I will say at the outset that, in answering this question, I’m defining “holy” not as we colloquially do now as basically “without sin” but in its earlier sense of “set apart.” That is, the question I’m asking is, To what extent does God want us to separate ourselves from the world? And by that … [Read more…]