Sex and the Supremacy of Technique
Last week’s essay from Matthew Lee Anderson and Andrew Walker about evangelicals and in vitro fertilization makes an argument worth discussing: God intends that sex and procreation should not be separated from each other. It made me think of the...
Desire, Duty, and Dynamite
As it becomes clearer and clearer that global climate change is dangerous and will require enormous efforts to protect human lives from its effects, the debate about how our individual choices and corporate efforts affect us has only gotten sharper....
Savage Love: A Review of the Work of Elisabeth Elliot
“‘You are loved with an everlasting love,’ that’s what the Bible says, ‘and underneath are the everlasting arms.’ This is your friend Elisabeth Elliot…” I grew up hearing those words regularly on the radio as they opened Elisabeth Elliot’s “Gateway...
“Easier For People To Be Good”: Ten Theses on the Bible, Poverty, and Justice
Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day wrote about building “that kind of society where it is easier for people to be good”. While Maurin and Day were very much against statism (PDF) and would probably disagree with a number of the...
And Who Is My Neighbor?
The Bible tells Christians to love their neighbors as they love themselves. But who is their neighbor? The man next door? Yes. The people who live across town? Surely. Those who live in another part of their country? Okay. People...
Time to Flourish: On the Center for Public Justice’s New Paid Family Leave Report
If there is anything that the recent political sturm und drang about family separation at the border has emphasized, it is the undeniable sanctity of the family—at least in the political imaginary. The idea that the state might separate children...
Defending the Vulnerable Requires More Than a New Supreme Court Justice
Last week, Freedom Road (a justice-oriented consulting group) released a statement calling for a “pause” on the culture war. Occasioned by the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, it zeroes in on the problem of abortion and poverty...
Romans 13, Jeff Sessions, and Separating Families at the Border
In Dr. James Dobson’s Letter from 2012 predicting the dire consequences of an Obama election, he included the possibility of homeschooling families being forced to flee to Australia or New Zealand to continue educating their children at home. Imagine, if you...
Stay Woke, Cultivate Virtue
Many young apologetics students of my generation learned the truism that “without God, anything goes.” While our culture has flirted with the idea of taking amoral individualism seriously, most decent atheists and quasi-theists will prefer to defend a moral framework...
Moral Formation and Sexual Abuse, Part II: Learning to love what is good by loving one another
Part 1 If human beings were perfectly rational masters of their appetite by default, “Just don’t abuse women!” would be a sufficient response to the crisis of sexual abuse (along with “Punish the abusers!”). One sees a very strong Pelagian...