Tomorrow is Good Friday. Hundreds of millions of Christians around the world will observe the day Jesus was nailed to the cross to save us from our sins. For many, it is a day of fasting. Of silence. Of prayer and contemplation. And that is as it should be.
I’ve learned a lot from Glenn Sunshine, the longest-serving faculty member of the Colson Fellows Program, and a professor of history at Central Connecticut State University. Glenn not only gets history, he also really gets worldview and, even better, how worldview and history are related.
Last year President Trump signed a proclamation declaring April to be “Second Chance Month.” In the declaration, he said “We celebrate those who have exited the prison system and successfully re-entered society.”
The Trump Administration has been a stalwart defender of Americans’ religious liberty. From repealing the HHS mandate, to protecting religious rights in the workplace, and especially the appointment of justices and judges who respect the first amendment, the “more” that was promised by the President after that initial executive order has been delivered.
The New York Times recently told the story of Maha Kassef, an elementary school teacher in Montreal who, like many teachers, dreams of one day being a principal. That dream may never happen, and for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with her qualifications.
Thirteen months ago, the University of Virginia men’s basketball team suffered the most humiliating defeat in NCAA Tournament history. Not only were the Cavaliers the first number-one seeded team is history to lose their opening round game to a sixteenth-seeded team, the University of Maryland Baltimore County beat them by twenty points. This season, they were forced to endure the same chant at every road game they played: “UMBC! UMBC!”
C. S. Lewis’s “The Screwtape Letters” has a lot of amazing insights on the working of our enemy, but one of my favorites occurs when the demon undersecretary advises his nephew: “Above all, do not attempt to use science…as a defence against Christianity. [It] will positively encourage [your patient] to think about realities he can’t touch and see. There have been sad cases among the modern physicists.”
There’s a line credited to C. S. Lewis that I often repeat: “The most dangerous ideas in a society are not the ones being argued but rather the ones that are assumed.” In our time, that saying perfectly describes the idea that our desires determine our identities.
A recent article in the national magazine of the Sierra Club asked the question, “Does a Bear Think in the Woods?” Beyond the clever play on the old rhetorical question, the article made the remarkable claim that the intelligence of bears, chimpanzees, and other great apes shares “many properties with our own.”
