When religion, especially Christianity, was dominant didn’t we live in a Dark Age?
Americans are not very good at history. We are a young country where Disneyland’s fiftieth anniversary was marked as an historical event. Safe to say, many of my students’ main ideas about the Middle Ages are like those in Monty Python’s classic movie, Search for the Holy Grail.
W...
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This is an odd election. The Republican brand is nearly terminal and they should lose in November, but their opposition decided to nominate the most liberal member of the United States Senate. If they were going to win, the Democrats decided to win with a real progressive. That makes sense, but it also means they could lose an election they should be certain to win.
This is...
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I have always viewed the last Indiana Jones film, the Last Crusade, as the perfect summer film. It was well made, had engaging characters, and was fun. Nobody goes to a summer film to see The Passion of Joan of Arc , but the movie also made one think . . . even if only briefly.
The first film, Raiders, convinced Christians to go to PG films without hesitation (killing the G...
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The problem with ideologues in politics is their attempt to make a science of something that is an art. Unlike Aristotle and Burke, ideologues forget that politics is inexact and that wisdom has been hard won over centuries of experience and thought. There is, really, no science of politics. Of course, the same difficulties apply to ethics.
Ideologues wish that politics and ...
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Father in heaven,
We bring these graduating seniors of the Torrey Honors Institute before you today with thankfulness, joy, and relief. We present them to you with their Torrey educations completed. And in this sweet moment of successful accomplishment, we admit to you that we do not completely understand the meaning of what we have done.
We think we have helped them l...
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Charity Never Faileth . . .
Torrey Commencement 2008
Honored Members of the Torrey Honors Institute, Faculty, Tutors, and Administration, Parents, and Torrey class of 2008:
Graduation is a day for love. In triumph, we find it easy to love everyone . . . we may even forgive the tutor who gave us such a hard time at Don Rags sophomore year. Gratitude, a sure sign of chari...
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PBS's American Experience did a show last year on Aimee Semple McPherson (1890-1944), the Pentecostal evangelist so archetypal that her whole life read like a movie script. The PBS documentary movie was surprisingly good, featuring interviews with most of the leading scholars responsible for major publications on McPherson in the past decade (Edith Blumhofer, Anthea Butler, D...
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The Soviet Union killed twenty-two million of its own people. Many of them died for the "crimes" of religion, class, and ethnicity.
Needless to say, if Senator Obama had a group play for him that usually opens with the anthem of that murderous regime, then he is guilty of extraordinary bad taste at the very least.
Even if the group normally plays this song, but did not ...
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I just read that Senator Ted Kennedy has a serious illness.
I stopped what I was doing and prayed for him and urge you to do the same.
This is true, even if you disagree with him politically as I do.
Common humanity is more important than politics. Failure to realize this is neither conservative nor Christian. We pray for Senator Kennedy as a human being, because we r...
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In his book God Is Not Great professional man about town, Christopher Hitchens opined that religion has never done anything good for the world. This sort of extreme claim has the immediate benefit of being totally immune to contrary evidence. The more offensive an argument, the more likely an opponent is to stutter or become distracted by the sheer outrage of the claim. A Chris...
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An Evangelical Christian is, broadly, a follower of the teachings of Jesus. They live within a knowledge tradition marked by a commitment to reason, truth, authenticity, moderation, and charity.
Evangelicals are dynamic and not parochial, growing explosively all over the world. Evangelicals are urban and rural, black and white, Hispanic and Anglo. They are members of old rel...
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Featured Essay
Advice to anybody who wants to think well about theology: Find a holy person and watch them closely.
Good theologians are good saint-watchers. They pay attention to the believers they know, and devote time to describing what they see taking place in the lives of the people around them who are conspicuously Christ-like. They should also be good at catching the scent of hol...
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