Sep 4, 2018 | Culture
Life can be so ineffably sad sometimes, and when I recently read about the suicide of a high-profile pastor I couldn’t get it out of my mind. It made me angry even as it broke my heart. Commenting on a situation like it is fraught with danger in an age such as ours, so I will tread as lightly as I can. The reason for my trepidation is that our secular age imposes certain values and interpretations of reality upon us that are antithetical to our faith, and Christians have imbibed many of them. It’s very difficult not to because that’s the way culture works; you breathe it’s air, you absorb its values, and its way of seeing things, its interpretation of reality.
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Jul 25, 2018 | Culture
The subject of this post may sound vaguely familiar, but with a very postmodern, 21st century twist. Many are familiar with the beloved 1908 novel by Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables. Netflix has adapted the novel into a series called Anne with an E, and it bears only a passing resemblance to the children’s book of another, less “enlightened” era. The creator of the series, Moira Walley-Beckett, worked as a writer and producer of AMCs hit series Breaking Bad, which may not be the best preparation for bringing Anne of Green Gables to the small screen.
I’d never read the book, but during the first season I came across an article at the liberal Slate magazine with the apt title regarding the series, “Netflix’s dark, gritty reboot of Anne of Green Gables has all the subtlety of a chalkboard smashed over your head.” I wasn’t sure about the chalkboard in the first season, but 7 episodes into the second season, I realized the aptness of her title. Thus my version of the book’s title as gay, and I don’t mean happy. More of that in a second.
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Jun 10, 2018 | Culture
The statistics tell us that 45,000 people kill themselves in America every year; that is 123 per day! According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (which obviously isn’t doing a very good job), for every successful suicide, 25 people try to kill themselves. If my calculator is correct, somewhere around 1.125 million people every year (over 3,000 a day!) so hate their lives that they attempt to snuff them out. What’s scary is that the rate of this happening has increased 24% since 1999.
This relatively quite epidemic vaulted into the headlines this past week with the suicides of two high profile celebrities who killed themselves in the prime of their lives. Kate Spade first on June 5. She was a fashion designer and businesswoman who founded a billion dollar business. She was known to suffer from depression and took medication for it. The other shocking suicide was Anthony Bourdain in Friday, June 8. He was a celebrity chef, author, and television personality. He was also known to suffer from depression.
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Apr 20, 2018 | Culture, Explanatory Power
In the soon to be blockbuster best-seller, The Persuasive Christian Parent, I tell the story of “the clicker.” Yes, that clicker, more commonly known as the remote control. As you’ll read in the book, the clicker is a great tool for engaging popular culture with our children, and teaching them the incredible explanatory power of the Christian worldview. An example comes from a movie we recently watched called Conspiracy. This gut wrenching film dramatizes a day long conference that took place on January 20, 1942, where Nazi officials discuss the “Final Solution of the Jewish question.” This solution was of course the attempt to murder all Jews in Germany, and it was hoped beyond. The cold, calculating demeanor of most of the participants as portrayed in the film is chilling. To figure out who would be included, they discussed blood percentages, parentage, and whether they were German citizens or not. The goal was complete extermination, and it was difficult at times to realize they were talking about human beings, not animals or something less. The clicker got a good workout.
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Mar 10, 2018 | Culture
You can tell from the title of this post, that I won’t be running for political office anytime soon. What’s wrong with public schools? Why would I think they should be abolished? Many would call me crazy, but my argument is based on the first amendment to the Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . .” The public schools have an established religion, the religion of secularism/agnosticism, and thus they are unconstitutional. On second thought, maybe I will run for office. That would be a great campaign slogan! But I’m deadly serious. The whole idea of public schools (i.e., government schools) in a pluralistic society is problematic. Why?
In a pluralistic society God must be bracketed as persona-non-grata (to keep the government appearance of neutrality to all the different religions and worldviews), so the schools are promoting a worldview that is hostile to Christianity, or any other religion for that matter. And the idea that government schools can be “neutral” to all religions and worldview is so obviously false it’s a wonder anyone has ever believed it. But believe it they have, and most still do. It’s not that the idea of a “secular” space in society that allows for people of all religions to get along by putting their religion on the shelf is a bad thing in itself. In fact, in most of our interactions with our fellow citizens it’s a very good thing. But the presumption that we could apply it to the education of our children is naive, dangerously so.
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Feb 17, 2018 | Culture
I’ve been on a bit of a secularism kick of late, and as you may know I’m not a fan. I thought of secularism, and its discontents, as I heard of the latest American mass shooting in our new home state of Florida. Seventeen people killed in the prime of life, not by a gun, but by a wicked person bent on destruction. People go off to school or work one morning, like every other morning before, and don’t come home, ever. A tragedy that we hope never touches us, our loved ones or friends, but which we can’t help but wonder if it may some day. Such is life in secular 21st century America.
Do I blame secularism for the carnage that has become a staple of the latter part of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries? You bet I do! And of course I blame sin and the fall, so we always have and always will deal with evil in all of its distorted manifestations of God’s good creation. But there is something unique about the senseless nature of killing and mayhem in our time. I would argue that what we are experiencing in American culture is a cumulative case of thoughts and ideas and actions that have been brewing for centuries. There are no simple causal links one can definitively point to, but rather a rushing river of existence away from God that has brought us to this point.
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