Americans too often worry more about what we call people than how we treat them.
The term “retarded” has outlived any usefulness, having turned into an insult, but the more important problem is how we treat differences in mental acuity.
I have known people who labored hard to give dignity to those with different abilities who used antiquated jargon that would horrify ...
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If you’ve just read this recent article called “Dispatches from Abroad” by Brett McCracken, you might be interested in this article called “Travelers’ Blessings” by Rick Steves. I’ve long been familiar with Rick Steves as one of the best travel guides for Europe, but I had no idea he was a Christian! He has some amazing insights on how travel helps your Christiani...
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Nothing, not a plague of Biblical proportions or a President Jon Edwards, would harm the Republic more than allowing a handsome football quarterback and his mother to give a Super Bowl commercial celebrating life.
The Super Bowl and the commercials that come with it have always been an event that celebrated taste and family values. This year while enjoying flatulent horses, ...
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Featured Essay
[by Brett McCracken, from Biola magazine, Winter '10, pp. 18-24]
What do we see when we travel? Is it just postcard scenery and famous landmarks? Confusing subway maps and exotic menus? Or can there be more to it than that?
G.K. Chesterton once said that the difference between a traveler and a tourist is that the traveler sees what he sees, while the tourist sees what he ...
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Taipei 101 skyscraper, modeled on the shape of bamboo
Today is the last day of my two-week stay in Taiwan, visiting relatives. Taiwan is often overlooked by Westerners in favor of China. My mother is from China and my father is from Taiwan, but I want to argue that Taiwan is more Chinese than China. If you want to experience China at its fullest, go to Taiwan, not China!
...
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The greatest works of Martin Luther King, Jr. are the "I have a dream" sermon and the "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." These are MLK at his best, when his preparation and his personal struggles lined up providentially with the turbulent events of the civil rights movement, and he found all the right words to say what needed to be said. Take up and read.
But King also produc...
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The Constitution of 1789 and republican values.
Ronald Reagan and tax cuts.
Orthodoxy and icons.
Some things go together naturally and pizza and NFL play-off football are two naturals. Over the course of my life no pizza was more guaranteed to disappoint than Domino's. It was as fake as Ben Nelson's hair. If you saw the box at a pizza party, you went for any other foot...
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Ignorance allows certainty, but punishes with narrowness. Ignorance grants ease of mind, but produces costly errors.
No place is this more evident in American culture than in those ignorant of Christianity. They think they know what Christians believe, but do not. They cheerfully dismiss with almost no thought serious truth claims made by religious thinkers. They revel in th...
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Mao Zedong. The name is often placed alongside other horrible dictators like Hitler, Mussolini, Pol Pot, and Stalin. Deaths of millions can be attributed to him. But I want to argue that he was one of the best things that ever happened to Christianity in China.
Right now I am in Taiwan (where my father’s side of the family is from; my mother’s side is from China) visi...
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Who, I ask you, wouldn't enjoy taking a walk around the Oxford countryside with C.S. Lewis? Surely, no matter what you wanted to talk about, that many-sided man, that generous soul and omnivorous reader would be able to engage you in illuminating conversation. Surely.
But no. In second volume of The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis (Books, broadcasts, and the War, 1931-1949)...
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I’m afraid I forgot to post this blog earlier in the month, but now that I am at the Urbana missions conference, I am reminded that I ought to rectify this mistake.
Lesslie Newbigin (born December 8, 1909) would have celebrated his 100th birthday a few weeks ago (he died on January 31, 1998). Newbigin was probably the foremost missiologist of the twentieth century (th...
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Question: "Do you like Kipling?"
Answer: "I don't know, I've never kippled."
Today (December 30) is the birthday of Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), the enormously popular writer who was the first English author to win the Nobel Prize in literature (1907) in his early 40s.
But aside from a couple of childrens' stories (The Jungle Book and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi), most of Kipling...
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