Oct 14, 2018 | Parents and Family
That’s actually another book in my brain, and one I think needs to be written (and there are plenty already out there, but I may have something unique to add to the conversation; we’ll see . . .), but right now a blog post, or two, is the best I can do. I was inspired to write something on classical education because of a piece I recently read about education in the American Thinker that didn’t even use the phrase classical education. The title made it a necessary read for me: “Marxism and Education.” The author tells the story of how American education became radically re-envisioned in the early part of the 20th century, and you can infer from the title that Marxism was a seminal influence in that process. As he says, very few people today in or out of education are aware of these influences, but Marxist assumptions are ubiquitous in the American education marketplace.
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Oct 7, 2018 | Culture
I don’t often get into political discussions here because this is a website about apologetics for my Christian faith and worldview, but I’ve also practiced apologetics for my political and economic convictions with my kids all their lives. These convictions of course stem from my Christianity, so are an extension of my Christian view of reality. I have sought to persuade my children that they make sense to me, and ought to make sense to them as well. I am convinced my children would no more become left-wing, progressive, liberals than that they would become secularist agnostics or Hindus. Which brings me to Tim Keller and the concept of “social justice.”
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Oct 3, 2018 | Notable Quotations
But in the end, we can’t make the difference. As Western country after Western country devolves into a battle between the Hard-Heads of left and right, we’ll need a force more powerful than smart ideas to keep us from ripping apart. Or from enacting policies that serve good ends by wicked means. In fact, Hard-Headed laws can’t even save us. Nations with vanishing birth rates can build all the walls they want. (And of course, they should.) But they’ll die off by natural causes even without Islamist invaders unless they rediscover the goodness of life, dig down to the roots of their culture which are watered from the Cross.
As David P. Goldman wrote in How Civilizations Die, it turns out that once contraception exists, people won’t bother replacing themselves unless they believe in God. Only the prospect of eternal life is enough to make this one bearable. Or to make the sacrifices entailed by child-rearing worth it. If you really think you’re just a dying animal on a dying planet in a universe gradually winding down to its heat death, it makes perfect sense to grab all the happy moments you can. That doesn’t leave much room for bawling infants and diapers, sullen teenagers and their tuition.
So all the conservative causes we cherish because they make sense, are fair, and effective … they’re doomed without the Gospel. Every nation which abandons God pretty quickly gives up the ghost.
—John Zmirak, “The War on Kavanaugh Shows Us Why We Needed Trump, and Why Trump Needs Jesus”
Sep 30, 2018 | Plausibility
Critics of Christianity, and often Christians themselves, wonder why at times it seems that God is hidden from us. God never makes himself so obvious it is impossible for us to doubt. Why doesn’t he, they always and we sometimes ask, make himself more obvious? That’s a fair question, and not only one we modern people enveloped in a secular culture ask. As an answer, I’ve discovered reading the Bible from cover to cover, and also writing my way through my reading, that God rarely makes himself so obvious that it can’t be explained in some other way. There are few times in redemptive history that Yahweh, Israel’s God, makes himself so obvious that it would seem impossible for the people to question his existence, but that never determines their trust in and obedience to him.
I love that the Bible is this way because it’s not terribly different than our own lived experience, as it has been all throughout the history of the Church for his people. If what we read in the Bible was completely different than our partially hidden encounter with God, then I would have a tough time believing it was true. As it is, the Bible reads real. The examples are endless, but something that stands out to me is the passage of time; God is never in a hurry. Doesn’t it seem that way in our lives? His timeline and ours rarely intersect. In the Bible that’s magnified a zillion times.
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Sep 18, 2018 | Plausibility
I’ve always been a big history guy, but had never read Eusebius: The Church History until recently. As with almost everything in my life now, I had apologetic motivations for reading it. Skeptics are always distorting the history of early church, and I wanted to see what someone who lived so close to the beginnings of our faith had to say about it. I’ve always known that followers of Jesus endured horrible persecution for almost 300 years after his ascension, but reading an historian (263-339) who witnessed it first hand, and who reported on other first-hand accounts, was sobering. What stood out to me was something we in the 21st century secular West have a hard time accepting: this life is not all there is. Of course we Christians claim to disbelieve this, but we live much of our lives as if this life was indeed all their is. I’m as guilty of it as anyone else because in our thoroughly secular culture it’s very easy to do.
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