60 Minutes Australia reports on a 12-year old boy who was diagnosed with gender dysphoria and who decided to “transition” to become a female (watch above). With the help of his mother, he adopted a female identity, began taking female hormones, and grew breasts. Two year later, however, at the age of 14, he changed his mind. He decided that he didn’t want to be a girl after all. But his body had already been permanently changed by the female hormones. His reversal will now require surgery, including breast reduction surgery to try and make his feminine-looking frame look more masculine. A few thoughts on this: 1. The science conclusively…

Anthony Esolen has a prescient essay in which he demonstrates that homosexuality undermines male friendships. He argues that the removal of the taboo and the openness of homosexual relations in the modern age cast a shadow over male friendships in general. He writes: Imagine a world wherein the taboo has been broken and incest is loudly and defiantly celebrated. Your wife’s unmarried brother puts his hand on your daughter’s shoulder. That gesture, once innocent, must now mean something, or at least suggest something. If the uncle were wise and considerate, he would not make it in the first place. You see a father hugging his teenage daughter as she leaves…

A wise preacher once said that it is good to get downwind of yourself whenever you can. Sometimes we don’t smell our own B.O. when everyone around us wishes that we would. It’s an odiferous metaphor for the way our lives sometimes unfold. Sometimes our self-perceptions do not match the perceptions that others have of us. And even if other people’s perceptions are wrong, we do well to understand what their perceptions are. Sometimes they are right. I thought about that as I read the Texas Monthly profile of Jen Hatmaker. If anything, the article helps evangelicals to get downwind of themselves—to see where self-perception may not match the perception…

Like you, I’ve been watching with dismay and disgust as events have unfolded in Charlottesville, Virginia over the weekend. There has been a naked display of racism and white supremacy. If ever there were a time for evangelical Christians to speak with biblical conviction and moral clarity, now is the time. In doing so, no one should be taking their cues from the president of the United States on how to do this. Both this weekend and in his campaign, he has not shown moral clarity or leadership in this area (although as I write, there is an update). Rather, we should be taking our cues from scripture, which is…

I wrote an article about seven years ago on what the bible teaches about homosexuality. That essay begins with a discussion of Brian McLaren’s then recent affirmation of committed homosexual relationships. It is strange to read that essay now and to consider in retrospect how quickly McLaren faded from evangelical view. At the time, the “emerging church” still had some purchase within the evangelical movement. Now that entire project is defunct and so are its major proponents. They pushed the very edges of the leftwing of the evangelical movement until they pushed themselves right out of the movement. Many of them did so by adopting unorthodox positions on sexuality. The…

N. T. Wright penned a letter to the editor of The Times of London this morning expressing his thoughts about “gender-fluid” children. Responding to articles about gender identity confusion–and even trans-speciesism–in children, he writes: The confusion about gender identity is a modern, and now internet-fuelled, form of the ancient philosophy of Gnosticism. The Gnostic, one who “knows”, has discovered the secret of “who I really am”, behind the deceptive outward appearance (in Rifkind’s apt phrase, the “ungainly, boring, fleshy one”). This involves denying the goodness, or even the ultimate reality, of the natural world. Nature, however, tends to strike back, with the likely victims in this case being vulnerable and impressionable…