What should be done when parents rely on religion instead of medicine to heal sick children?
Christians know we are all broken. Nobody is perfect and so no human being can be trusted with total power. Institutions are often megaphones for personal power. In noble hands, like those of Reverend Martin Luther King, great good can be done with power, but even King was not perfec...
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On the birthday of G. K. Chesterton (May 29, 1874), here are my three favorites from among his many poems.
One for the not yet born, one for those of us making our ways through the everyday, and one for the very old.
By The Babe Unborn
If trees were tall and grasses short,
As in some crazy tale,
If here and there a sea were blue
Beyond the breaking pale,
If a ...
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John Calvin (born 1509, died this day, May 27, in 1564) didn't want to be a celebrity. He even tried his best to avoid taking a leading role in the second generation of the Reformation. When his death was approaching, he arranged to have himself buried in an unmarked grave to make sure nobody would come venerate his relics.
And though he produced a heavy shelf of books and c...
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What is California literature? For a class about California in the great books tradition, I had to pick a half-dozen of the best books for students to read and discuss. Which raises the question, what counts as California literature?
The most helpful discussion I've read on the subject is not exactly up to date, but it's a 1955 article full of wise counsel. The article, "Cal...
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Sonia Sotomayor is President Obama’s pick for the court. From the point of view of conservatives, she is probably as good a pick as President Obama was going to make. Something new may come out about her, but if not conservatives should give the reasons they think her judicial philosophy is mistaken and then move on.
She is a mainstream liberal and President Obama was not...
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Jonathan Edwards's grave in Princeton, New Jersey
OK, I know this may seem like a morbid topic, but I love visiting cemeteries. However, I think Americans are beholden to a cultural captivity of fear of cemeteries. In the rest of the world, especially Europe, cemeteries do not evoke images of zombies or Stephen King novels. In Europe, many people are buried in churches,...
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"We make our buildings, and then our buildings make us," Winston Churchill once said, pointing out how important architecture is. Less grandiosely, we could say that buildings influence their inhabitants in many subtle ways.
Most people notice architecture's mind-altering powers only if they live in especially bad buildings or especially good ones. A cramped room can make a...
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The first method of Bible study that we shall consider is the study of the Bible by individual books. This method of study is the most thorough, the most difficult, and the one that yields the largest and most permanent results. We take it up first because in the author's opinion it should occupy the greater portion of our time.
I.—The first work to do, is to select the bo...
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This is an occasion for celebration for anybody connected to the Torrey Honors Institute: John Mark Reynolds has published his long-awaited introduction to Greek thought for Christians. When Athens Met Jerusalem is now available from InterVarsity Press. As J. Budziszewski says on the back cover of the book, for anybody who suspects that "it must be a treat to sit in John Mark R...
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John Raleigh Mott was born today (May 25) in 1865 and died in 1955. He was a man with a motto: The Evangelization of the World in This Generation. The motto was controversial, and sounded far too optimistic and imperial to its critics. But as Mott patiently explained in numerous books and countless conference talks, he meant for it to be optimistic, because as he read the world...
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May 24 is the day in 1738 that John Wesley heard Scripture explained in a way that caused him to feel his heart “strangely warmed,” and knew himself to be a child of God. He was in a church service at Aldersgate, listening to somebody reading aloud from Martin Luther’s commentary on Galatians. And it hit him!
If you lay out the events of his life before and after Alde...
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Today eighty students will become perpetual members of the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University.
Here are three thoughts for this day . . . and a reminder that the day itself is not the reward for the study. The reward is in what you carry within you. The ceremony is just an outward sign of that inner reality. If you carry nothing in your soul, the ceremony is meanin...
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