There was a time when theft required a crowbar. Today it requires a laptop. The modern criminal does not need to kick down the front door. He simply logs onto a government website, assumes the identity of someone he has never met, or worse still someone who has already died, creates a student persona who never intends to attend class, collects thousands of dollars in federal financial aid, and disappears before the semester has even begun.
Read MoreJustices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson – all women – dissented on constitutional and statutory grounds. Their disagreement centered on how constitutional protections and federal law should be interpreted, not on a rejection of biology itself. Lawyers can, and undoubtedly will, debate the merits of those legal arguments for years.
Yet their votes inevitably raise a broader cultural question.
Read MoreEvery four years the world gathers around a simple game. Twenty-two players. One ball. One referee. The same rules apply whether you arrive from Buenos Aires or Birmingham, Lagos or Los Angeles, Tokyo or Texas. No nation receives extra players. No country begins with a head start. Football – what my fellow Americans reluctantly call soccer – has an unusual way of reminding humanity that fairness begins with everyone agreeing to play by the same rules.
Read MoreEvery June, corporations change their logos, government institutions issue proclamations, schools organize celebrations, and media outlets devote extensive coverage to Pride Month. The message is clear: this is a month set aside to celebrate one particular identity and one particular social movement.
Read MoreAmerica tells stories about itself constantly. I love them all. Britain does too, of course, but the American story is uniquely moral in its framing. It is not merely historical; it is aspirational. Every schoolchild is handed fragments of Lincoln, echoes of Jefferson, and eventually, the towering rhetoric of Martin Luther King Jr. Whether the nation has fully embodied those ideals is another matter entirely, but the ideals themselves became part of the social catechism.
Read MoreThe question of Israel cannot be understood without careful distinctions: ancient, modern, and symbolic. When those distinctions collapse, confusion fills the space, and into that confusion rush posturing politics, theocratic theology, endless economics, and frightful fear.
Read MoreIn quiet pastoral conversations, and in louder public forums, I’m hearing more about a deep fatigue among the community of Christian faith. Words like immigration, deportation, borders, compassion, and law can divide a room. At the center of this debate stands U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Read MoreThere is something unsettling about rereading Orwell’s 1984 in our current moment. Not because we are goose-stepping through dystopian streets under giant posters of a mustachioed tyrant. And not because secret police are kicking down doors in the middle of the night. But because the mechanisms Orwell described – the subtle erosion of language, the quiet normalization of contradiction, the slow trade of truth for loyalty – feel less like fantasy and more like possibility.
Read MoreLogic and reason are being ushered out of the room. What’s left is a growing fog of how beliefs and values are expressed and especially the language that is used. Once upon a time logic and reason cleared any foggy notion that came up in conversation, but we are now seemingly left to the unquestionable imbeciles that lack rational thought. These self-regulating halfwits emerge in the room replacing logic and reason like a tribe of Oompa Loompa’s from Willy Woke’s Chocolate Factory.1 And they don’t just emerge, they come with woeful virtue signaling.
Read MoreIn his allegorical story called Animal Farm, George Orwell writes, “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”1 The animals on a particular farm were rebelling against the concept that humans did not distribute resource, opportunity, and privilege equally. In pursuit of Comrade Napoleon’s vision of an egalitarian world – where all animals can be equal – the livestock passionately rebel against the human power structure.
Read MoreI’m going to take you from the sublime to the ridiculous in this blog, and I’m going to sincerely be an advocate for women’s rights, or more specifically, women’s rights in competitive sports.
So, let’s begin with the sublime by quoting the founder of the Olympic Games Committee from 120 years ago. “The Olympic Games were created for the solemn and periodic exaltation of male athleticism with female applause as reward.”1 French aristocrat Baron Pierre de Coubertin made this seemingly misogynous comment adding, “as no women participated in the Ancient Games, there obviously was to be no place for them in the modern ones.”2
Read MoreWe use “lovely” too casually. We say it about a garden, a painting, a wedding dress. But when David writes, “How lovely is your dwelling place,” he’s not talking about aesthetics. He’s talking about loveliness that stirs the soul — beauty that heals, holiness that attracts.
Read MoreLooking at the practice of Halloween by Christianity today, it has been said that it has "less to do with heresy than with syncretism – the mixing of different beliefs and practices in ways that distort the truth and power of the gospel"
Read MoreFrustration, profound frustration. We’ve all been there, perhaps you are there right now. Before depression became known as ‘depression’ in our mental state, Peter sat with his friends on the shores of Galilee thoroughly depressed. His response, “I’m going out to fish.” Nothing wrong with a good day’s work to combat depression, unless you knew better.
Read MoreThe problem in linguistics is not just one of language but also of generations. Words stay the same, but their meaning changes fast. For example, I have a publication in my library called Fagots on the Fire. The word “gay” is use throughout, but it meant a disposition of happiness not an orientation. When the Thomas Oliphant wrote the Christmas song Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly the third line reads, “Don we now our gay apparel”. Oliphant did not mean we do Christmas in drag, rather, wear colorful clothing. Hence, the problem of communication is not only one of language but generations.
Read MoreI’d never seen it before, and it does not compare to God Save Our Gracious King in Britain. It was September 1999. I had been granted a visa to relocate my family from Britain to America. One month in, I was captured by baseball spectators representing both teams standing with their hand – and in many cases a baseball cap – covering their heart and singing the Star-Spangled Banner
Read More“A new man is arising…and yet I am sorry to lose God!”
Who said this, who is the new man, and why does it matter?
Read MoreA man once asked, “Who is this that appears like the dawn, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, majestic as the stars in procession?” His name was Solomon, the third king of Israel. Despite having 700 wives and 300 concubines, he appears to search for an alluding answer. Perhaps the first woman to walk the earth can help us in searching for an answer.
Read MoreOpening his eyes after a deep sleep, Adam’s gaze was fixed upon the most alluring figure. In that moment he announces, “She shall be called woman”. Adam’s identifying announcement is either a matter of orthodoxy, myth, or something else. If orthodoxy, his words bring a great deal to the table in identifying a woman and questions of how he knew. If myth, his words can be read as mansplaining by not giving Eve the opportunity to identify herself, “My name is Eve, I am a woman and I go by the pronouns she and her."
Read MoreWe’ve all read tales of hope or despair.
You may have read classic stories like David Copperfield (Dickens), Tom Jones (Fielding) or Les Misérables (Hugo). If you have, I guarantee your imagination latched on to a growing theme of hope as you turned each page.
How do I know? It’s what the author intended you to experience. Victor Hugo said of his novel Les Misérables, “So long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of this nature cannot fail to be of use.” The story of Jean Valjean has brought hope to many as a tale of redemption!
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