• Christianity,  Culture

    Fading Glory and Permanent Things

    I just finished watching a documentary about a band that was popular when I was a kid. If I told you who the group was, you would recognize them immediately. But I suppose naming them is pointless. It’s the same story after all. A love for music, a quest for fame and glory, hedonistic indulgence along the way, unhappiness and depression in spite of fame and fortune. The lead singer has been dead for several years now. As the film finished, this is the word that stirred in my heart: “All flesh is grass, and all its loveliness is like the flower of the field The grass withers, the flower…

  • Complementarianism,  Culture,  Entertainment

    The Child Will Never Be Born

    My wife and I had been hearing and reading mixed reviews on the Barbie film, so last night we decided to go and check it out for ourselves. I think it’s safe to say that from the jump, the film left us pretty cold. The very first scene shows morose-looking little girls in a dark and barren landscape playing with baby dolls. The desert backdrop and the sullen expressions on the girls’ faces make it clear that playing at maternal stereotypes is oppressive and limiting for a young girl. After all, there is much more to life than the drudgery of motherhood. So the girls smash their baby dolls into…

  • Christianity,  Culture

    How a Christian Patriot Might Love His Wayward Country

    I love G. K. Chesterton’s reflections on what it means to be a Christian patriot. If you have never read it, I encourage you to read “The Flag of the World” in his classic work Orthodoxy. Chesterton contends that love of one’s homeland is not like house-hunting—an experience in which you weigh the pros and cons of a place and choose accordingly. He writes: A man belongs to this world before he begins to ask if it is nice to belong to it. He has fought for the flag, and often won heroic victories for the flag long before he has ever enlisted. To put shortly what seems the essential…

  • Culture,  News,  Personal

    Farewell, Charlie Brown Christmas

    “A Charlie Brown Christmas” was an annual fixture of my childhood. For me, this special and “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer” were two highlights of the Christmas season. Those were the days when there were only three broadcast channels and before people had VCR’s. You couldn’t record it to watch at your leisure. “A Charlie Brown Christmas” came on once a year, and if you missed it, you’d have to wait an entire year for another opportunity to see it. You had to “check your local listings” to know when it would be on, and then you made an appointment to plant yourself in front of the television to watch the…

  • Christianity,  Culture,  Politics

    Albert Mohler on Evangelicals and Christian Nationalism

    Astead Herndon of The New York Times recently interviewed Dr. Albert Mohler about politics, American evangelicalism, and Christian Nationalism. The interview is a part of “The Guardrails” episode of “The Run-Up” podcast. The New York Times has made a transcript available, which I have excerpted below. This is a fascinating interview on a number of levels. The interviewer is adversarial, but in a polite way and allows Mohler to make his points. Mohler does a better job than just about anyone I’ve heard at parrying charges of Christian Nationalism. It’s fascinating that so many media personalities do not seem to understand that there is no such thing as Christian Nationalism…

  • Culture,  Transgenderism

    Destroying the Healthy Bodies of Minor Children

    Matt Walsh has posted a thread on Twitter that is currently going viral. It features videos from the transgender clinic at Vanderbilt in Nashville. You need to watch these videos to understand just how disturbing the treatment of gender-confused children really is. The videos reveal that the doctors are performing gender “affirmation” surgeries on children because it’s a “big money maker.” According to Vanderbilt, surgeries removing children’s healthy sexual organs are lucrative because they require a lot of “follow ups.” Which is another way of saying that cutting off healthy organs often results in life-altering, long-term, painful complications. That’s why “follow-ups” are required. But it’s a big “money maker” for…

  • Christianity,  Culture,  Homosexuality,  News,  Transgenderism

    Parents, Don’t Be Gaslighted by Biased News Reports

    One of the hardest things to read today are biased news reports aimed at gaslighting parents who are concerned about LGBT indoctrination at public schools. Case in point: A headline in The Washington Post yesterday reads “Claim that sex ed ‘grooms’ kids jolted Nebraska politics a year before it swept the nation.” The story goes on to describe the efforts of parents in Nebraska to push back against the state’s efforts to introduce LGBT propaganda into their children’s public school curriculum. Lest you think this an unbiased report on a bellwether social issue in Nebraska, the subtitle reads: The unsubstantiated claim led to a backlash against sex ed that helped…

  • Christianity,  Culture,  Homosexuality,  News

    Sexual Immorality Driving a World Health Emergency

    Rod Dreher wrote yesterday about the hypocrisy of public health authorities in 2020 who mandated lockdowns for COVID but who made exceptions for Black Lives Matter protests. Our ruling class’s inconsistency during the summer of 2020 was obviously not being driven by hard science but by social concerns. If you belonged to a favored group (like a BLM protest), then you were allowed to gather. If you belonged to a disfavored group (like a church trying to gather for worship), you were not allowed to gather. While churches were being harassed by local governments for continuing to meet, enormous BLM protests continued apace. The entire spectacle demonstrated in spades that…

  • Abortion,  Culture,  Politics

    The Illiberal Left and Abortion

    Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the consequences of the Supreme Court’s abortion decision in Dobbs v. Jackson. The Democratic majority called three pro-abortion witnesses, and the Republican minority called two pro-life witnesses. I watched most of the hearing and listened to sworn testimony from all five witnesses. You would be hard-pressed to find a more stark expression of the division in our nation than what is on display in this testimony. Three witnesses lamented the overturning of Roe and argued in favor of new federal legislation to ensure abortion rights through all nine months of a woman’s pregnancy. They also argued that restricting abortion rights in…