Now here is a curious way of reporting. The headline in The New York Times reads this way, “Boy Scouts to Continue Excluding Gay People.” What’s so strange about this headline? Well, for starters, it casts the Boy Scouts in a negative light, as if they’ve taken some proactive step to stick it to gay people. But that is not at all what’s happened here. The story is simply about the fact that the Boy Scouts have not changed their policy on membership vis a vis homosexuals. The policy is now what it has always been. It hasn’t changed.
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The Little Boy Who Wanted To Be a Girl
I witnessed one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen last week. It was a report on NBC’s “Dateline” about an 11-year old child named Josie Romero. Josie looks like a normal little prepubescent girl. Only it turns out, that Josie was not born as Josie but as Joey. Josie was born biologically as a boy. Yet somewhere along the way, he decided that he liked behaving and dressing like a girl.
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Mere Patriotism
Brett McCracken has a fantastic little essay on patriotism over at the “Mere Orthodoxy” blog. In short, he extols patriotism and argues that it’s an error to confuse patriotism with nationalism. He writes: Patriotism is a good thing. It’s the natural emotional connection we have with place. We’re wired to ache for this notion of “home.” It’s what the Israelites longed for in the Sinai. It’s what the Hobbits longed for (the Shire) during their Middle Earth adventures. It’s what constitutes part of C.S. Lewis’s Sehnsucht: a nostalgic longing for the “Green Hills” of his Belfast childhood, “the low line of the Castlereagh Hills which we saw from the nursery…
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Doug Wilson Takes on Gay Activists in Q&A
Doug Wilson’s recent lectures on sexuality at Indiana University are absolutely riveting. If you start these, beware, because you might not be able to stop. Wilson followed the lectures with two hours of Q&A with a raucous, offended crowd. There were forty questions and forty answers in all. Watch the first trailer above and the second trailer below. To see the lectures and the Q&A, click here. This is quite an amazing thing to watch, and it’s worth offering some reflections on this spectacle.
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Why Americans Are Becoming More Pro-Life
Ashley McGuire explains at the Washington Post’s “On Faith” site why Americans are becoming more pro-life. After noting that Gallup is now recording the lowest level of self-described pro-choicers in its history of tracking the abortion issue, she writes: Many past civil rights movements in this country, such as the move to end slavery or the fight for women’s suffrage, were deeply rooted in religious conviction. Such is the case with the pro-life movement. But with each of these movements there was a tipping point where Americans saw that one need not be a devoutly religious person to recognize the social justice issue at stake and to get behind the…
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Mark Coppenger on “Blue Like Jazz”
I read Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz several years ago after finding that so many of my students were enamored with this hip new book that was taking the evangelical world by storm. At the time, the “emergent church” was all the rage among a certain sector of evangelicals, and folks were trying to sort out how the author Donald Miller fit within that whole discussion. In any case, my students loved the book and were talking about it, and I felt almost obligated to read it. So I did. I didn’t much care for the book. I thought it was irreverent in all the wrong ways. At the time,…
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Encyclopaedia Britannica Goes Out of Print
After 244 years, Encyclopaedia Britannica is now going out of print. This is not at all surprising, given the ubiquity of the internet. Nevertheless, it still feels a bit like a landmark, doesn’t it? The New York Times reports: In the 1950s, having the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the bookshelf was akin to a station wagon in the garage or a black-and-white Zenith in the den, a possession coveted for its usefulness and as a goalpost for an aspirational middle class. Buying a set was often a financial stretch, and many families had to pay for it in monthly installments.
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Two Stories Exposing the Bankruptcy of Pro-Choice Logic
Two stories recently in the news have exposed the absolute moral bankruptcy of pro-choice thinking. Both of them illustrate the fact that pro-choice logic leads not just to the devaluing of unborn human life but to that of newborn human life as well.
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Raquel Welch Says Pornography “Annihilates” Men
Raquel Welch recently sat for an interview with Men’s Health in which she commented that pornography is destroying men. I do not recommend the entire article, but I thought it remarkable and insightful that a secular former sex-symbol recognizes the dehumanizing effects of pornography: I think we’ve gotten to the point in our culture where we’re all sex addicts, literally. We have equated happiness in life with as many orgasms as you can possibly pack in, regardless of where it is that you deposit your love interest…
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Spring Break on Daytona Beach in 1962
NBC’s “Rock Center” pulled a video from the NBC vault of a news program showing what Spring Break was like on Daytona Beach, Florida in 1962. I have to say, even the rebels looked pretty straight-laced back then.