David Kotter makes a biblical case for the wisdom of free markets over at The Center for Gospel and Culture. He writes, The Bible does not endorse American-style Capitalism, nor did the early church practice Communist central planning in the early chapters of Acts. You will not find Adam Smith prophetically foretold in the Scriptures, nor any allusion to Karl Marx. Republican Party economics is not a required part of Christianity. Yet, the Bible contains clear economic principles and the early church grew in an environment of buying, selling, borrowing, and hiring. In essence, an economy of free markets and entrepreneurship follows from the commands given by God, though sin…
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Should we celebrate killing to cover up an affair?
I’ve often been struck by the way Matthew’s genealogy highlights King David’s infamy: “to Jesse was born David the king. And to David was born Solomon by her who had been the wife of Uriah” (Matthew 1:6). Bathsheba’s entire identity is swallowed up by David’s sin. Unlike the other three women in the list, her name is not even mentioned. She is called “the wife of Uriah”—as if Matthew wishes to invoke all the horror of David’s murderous cover-up that led to his marriage to Uriah’s wife. It is a sadness in the account, not a celebration.
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Bill Maher Defends Christianity
There is a fascinating interview between Charlie Rose and Bill Maher making the rounds. Bill Maher is no friend of Christianity. In fact, he’s an infamous opponent. Nevertheless, he has the intellectual honesty to acknowledge the obvious. He pushes back hard against Charlie Roses’s suggestion of a moral equivalence between Christianity and militant Islam. The exchange is captured above, but here’s the heart of it:
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14-year old Yazidi girl tells story of being “awarded” to an ISIS commander
The Washington Post has a first-person account of a 14-year old Yazidi girl who was kidnapped by militants and “awarded” to an ISIS commander. Her tale begins with her account of being kidnapped by ISIS troops. She writes: The militants divided us by gender and age: One for young and capable men, another for girls and young women, and a third for older men and women. The jihadists stole cash and jewelry from this last group, and left them alone at the oasis. Then they placed the girls and women in trucks. As they drove us away, we heard gunshots. Later we learned that they were killing the young men,…
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Persecution will never happen, but when it does, you Christians will deserve it
Rod Dreher reflects on the recent expulson of InterVarsity from the University of California system. Dreher indicates that this is only the beginning, and he offers a sobering word about the conflict that is upon American Christians for holding to a biblical sexual ethic. We are not in persecution now, but it does seem to be on the horizon. He writes: Look, this is coming. This is the new world. This is post-Christian America. You will hear the Law of Merited Impossibility people yelling that this will never happen, but when it does, you people will deserve it, to try to shout down your concerns, and to hide from themselves…
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Wendy Davis’s Abortion
Wendy Davis became a household name about a year ago during her filibuster for abortion rights in the Texas State legislature. Even though her filibuster ultimately failed, she nevertheless became a pro-choice superstar and a Democratic candidate for governor. She has recently published a memoir in which she reveals that she herself has had two abortions. She had the second abortion during her 2nd trimester after finding out that the baby had a serious brain abnormality. In the book she describes the aftermath. MySA reports, After getting several medical opinions and feeling the baby they had named Tate Elise “tremble violently, as if someone were applying an electric shock to…
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Who could have predicted the mess in Iraq?
Who could have predicted that terrorists groups like ISIS would overrun Iraq if America pursued a precipitous withdrawal of troops? It turns out that this result was entirely predictable and was in fact predicted by previous commander-in-chief in 2007. In a remarkably accurate warning, President Bush said this: I know some in Washington would like us to start leaving Iraq now. To begin withdrawing before our commanders tell us we’re ready would be dangerous for Iraq, for the region and for the United States. It would mean surrendering the future of Iraq to Al Qaida. It’d mean that we’d be risking mass killings on a horrific scale. It’d mean we’d…
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It’s passed time to get serious about ISIS
Peggy Noonan has a sobering column in today’s Wall Street Journal about the threat that ISIS poses to a war-weary United States. I encourage you to read the whole thing. When you do, don’t miss this part: One of my fears in the early years of the Iraq war was that if it proved to be the wrong war—if no weapons of mass destruction were found, if sustained unrest showed Saddam Hussein was the garbage-pail lid who kept the garbage of his nation from spilling out—it would mean that at some time in the future when America really needed to fight and had to fight, she would not. I feared…
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Refusing to call evil “evil”
I just read one of the most morally confused (and indeed asinine) things I’ve ever seen on the New York Times editorial page. The author is a professor named Michael Boyle, and he argues that we must not call the ISIS terrorist group evil. Why? Because the times don’t call for moral clarity. President Bush had moral clarity, and look where that got us–a decade of war. For this reason, Boyle argues that we should avoid describing ISIS as a “cancer” like President Obama did earlier this week. Such language keeps us from seeing the world as it is. This is the logic of appeasement. It’s very similar to the…
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It’s time to annihilate ISIS
Max Boot argues at Commentary Magazine that is it time to annihilate ISIS. In light of recent atrocities—which are now becoming too numerous to count—it is hard to disagree that ISIS deserves to be completely and utterly destroyed. I don’t pretend to know what the best strategy is to make that happen, but here’s what Boot writes: “What is needed now is not strongly worded condemnation of Foley’s murder, much less a hashtag campaign. What is needed is a politico-military strategy to annihilate ISIS rather than simply chip around the edges of its burgeoning empire. In the Spectator of London I recently outlined what such a strategy should look like.…