America’s founders believed that the freedom to express political and religious opinions, even unpopular ones, was central to self-government. Still, the freedom of speech, like all freedoms, has its limits. We can’t just shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater, for example.
Imagine you’re a college student, and your professor claims that science has disproved the idea of God, of the soul, of ultimate meaning, and of truth. What do you say to that professor?
The 1999 movie “The Cider House Rules” won writer John Irving an Oscar, and elevated him as a pro-abortion apologist. In his acceptance speech, Irving thanked Harvey Weinstein’s movie company Miramax for “having the courage to make this movie.” He then thanked the Academy for honoring a movie about abortion, as well as “everyone at Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Rights League.”
In “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon blames Rome’s demise, at least in part, on Christianity. He wrote, “The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged, and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister [and] a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion...”
Evidence suggests that Muslim Uighurs have joined Falun Gong practitioners on the list of China's involuntary donors. And it’s hard to imagine that Christians will not soon be added to that list, unless something changes.
The saga of one of the best female soccer players in the world is only the most recent evidence that American Christians need to develop a theology of getting fired, or if you happen to be in Jaelene Hinkle's profession, a theology of getting cut from the team.
Eugenics is a bad idea, a bad idea that, like all bad ideas, has victims. Efforts to keep those deemed inferior from reproducing or even existing were a central part of the Nazi experiment in Germany, which upended the entire world and led to the extermination of millions of so-called “lives unworthy of life.”
A recent story in New York Magazine asked readers how many bones they would be willing to break in order to attain intimacy—or something to that effect.
Back on October 22, 1844, tens of thousands of Americans who followed a preacher named William Miller, eagerly awaited the Second Coming of Christ. By “await,” I don’t mean that they had a general hope or belief, as in, “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.”
Every Johnny Cash fan remembers that song, “A Boy Named Sue,” about a young man’s quest to find his dead-beat dad and punch his lights out for giving him a girl’s name. Well, in a completely unrelated factoid, “Sue” is also the name of the Chicago Field Museum’s famous Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton, one of the largest ever unearthed.
