During Judge Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation hearings, Senator Mazie Hirono (D-HI) expressed outrage after Barrett used the term “sexual preference” instead of “sexual orientation.” Hirono argued that the phrase sexual preference "is an offensive and outdated term…used by anti-LGBTQ activists to suggest that sexual orientation is a choice—it is not.” It seems, however, that Senator Hirono is the one who is actually behind the times on the whole sexual orientation vs. sexual preference issue.
Last week, in a town hall discussion, the current frontrunner in the election for the presidency of the United States said, in absolute terms, that an eight-year-old boy should be allowed to identify as a girl, and the law and society should treat him as such. No one is laughing anymore.
Franch lawmakers recently passed a bill setting up labor protections for child social media stars. While protecting kids is always laudable, it feels a bit strange calling this new law a “win.”
Former New York Times writer, Bari Weiss, recently published a piece warning of a “danger, this one from the left … one that has attained cultural dominance, capturing America’s elites and our most powerful institutions.”
“I am here to ring the alarm,” writes Weiss. “I’m here to say: Do not be shocked anymore … It’s time to accept reality, if we want to have any hope of fixing it.” Weiss describes a growing and institutionally enforced anti-Semitism, and proceeds to list a series of incidents that she says cannot be accurately understood as isolated, but instead as an essential and insidious component of the new liberalism, a “mixture of postmodernism, postcolonialism, identity politics, neo-Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and the therapeutic mentality.”
A recent survey has found that nearly a third of self-described evangelicals do not believe that Jesus Christ is truly God.
Last week, federal court judge Salvador Mendoza, an Obama appointee, blocked the state of Washington from automatically banning those with religiously based objections to department policy from becoming foster parents.
The department’s policies, wrote Mendoza, only burdens “potential caregivers with sincere religious beliefs,” since those with religious beliefs are likely to object to the policy. Even more, these policies probably “favor certain secular viewpoints over certain religious viewpoints,” which is also a violation of religious liberties.
In a new analysis, scienists ask a simple question: Can we detect “fine-tuning” in biology as we can in physics? In answering this question the scientists found for the first time, a statistical framework for determining whether certain features in living things are fine-tuned or were “evolve-able.” Using this method, they demonstrate how functional proteins, cellular networks, and the biochemical machines found in cells exhibit evidence of “design.”
Our culture-wide unfamiliarity with the great books can be directly attributed it our culture-wide unfamiliarity with the Good Book. An undergrad from a small liberal-arts school, Abel is consistently surprised that his peers do not know even the best-known accounts in the Bible.
Our next Colson Center Short Course looks at four Christians -- the great Church Father St. Augustine of Hippo, Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the novelist Flannery O’Connor, and Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr -- each of whom navigated through difficult cultural events. The course is titled “How Four Christians from History Confronted Cultural Chaos,” and begins next Tuesday, October 20th, and continues each Tuesday (except for election night) through November 17th.
