Some of you may be wondering why I’ve been paying attention to this whole Rush Limbaugh dust-up. If you have been reading my blog for any amount of time, then you no doubt know why. I believe it is an urgent priority to sound the alarm about President Obama’s HHS mandate.
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Jim Hamilton on Believer’s Baptism and Close Communion
Jim Hamilton has contributed an article to The Gospel Coalition website on believer’s baptism. Jim and I are elders together at Kenwood Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. So the position he outlines in his essay is also my position. Here’s a brief statement of the view from Jim’s essay: Baptists believe that those who have not been immersed in water as believers to symbolize their union with Christ by faith have not been baptized. Presbyterians and other paedobaptists think they have been baptized, even if they have not been immersed in water as believers. John Bunyan agreed that baptism is the immersion of a believer in water but felt that…
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An Apology from Limbaugh, but the Damage Is Done
I am a Christian, and I am a social conservative. I oppose President Obama’s HHS mandate that requires employers to pay insurance premiums that cover chemical abortions, sterilization, and contraception. I support legislation that would accommodate citizens who do not want to be coerced by their government to pay for services that violate their consciences. In short, I find the HHS mandate to be an abhorrent assault on religious freedom. Furthermore, I believe it to be an open scandal that the national media narrative has turned the mandate into a debate about contraception rather than what it is—an assault upon the religious liberty of millions of Americans.
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Mystery Girl’s Entire Family Killed by Tornado
Most of us in Louisville heard the news yesterday about a 2-year old little girl who was found alone in the middle of a field after yesterday’s deadly tornadoes. No one knew who she was or where her family was until today, and it’s not good news. Here’s the report:
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Close Call with a Tornado
My good friend and former colleague Lawrence Smith had a close call with a tornado yesterday. He’s a reporter for our local Fox affiliate, and he and his camera man caught on video their near miss with one of the many tornados that strafed Southern Indiana on Friday. Chances are that you have already seen the raw footage (see above) because every news outlet in the country has been running it this evening. It is terrifying. Lawrence’s report on the evening news is below. I am grateful that you are okay, brother Lawrence. Great reporting!
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The Central Lie of Pornography
Doug Wilson says that the central problem with pornography is its “didactic and catechetical” nature, which tends to teach men lies about women. He writes: Porn is a sex ed curriculum put together by liars and incompetents. The central wrong lesson (one easily believed by guys, because it flatters them) is that women have men’s brains encased in women’s bodies. Everybody in the whole world is hot to go. Then, when he gets married to a normal woman, and discovers that all the free sex he thought was going to be on tap . . . isn’t on tap, at least not like what he expected, and he thinks he…
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Not Your Grandfather’s Southern Baptist
The Wall Street Journal has a fantastic article on the Rev. Fred Luter, the next president of the Southern Baptist Convention. It begins this way: For months, the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention has been debating whether to drop the word “Southern” from its name. But last week, citing the hassle and expense, leaders abandoned this attempt to scrub the racial overtones from the convention’s image. As it turns out, the SBC is poised to do something much more significant. Meet the Rev. Fred Luter Jr., pastor of New Orleans’s 4,500-member Franklin Avenue Baptist Church—and the man who this spring will likely become the first black president of the…
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The Gospel as Center
I was very pleased to receive in the mail today a new book edited by D. A. Carson and Tim Keller, The Gospel as Center: Renewing Our Faith and Reforming Our Ministry Practices. This book is the work of pastors associated with The Gospel Coalition, and through fourteen chapters they unpack the theology reflected in the foundational documents of the Coalition. What that means is that this book is primer in the essentials of evangelical faith, and it is written by seasoned pastors. Contributors include D. A. Carson, Timothy Keller, Kevin DeYoung, Philip Ryken, Bryan Chapell, Thabiti Anyabwile, Ligon Duncan, Sam Storms, and many more (full table of contents below).…
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Lesbian Is Denied Communion at Mother’s Funeral
From the MSNBC report: Barbara Johnson knew last Saturday, the day of her mother’s funeral, would be difficult. But she and her lesbian partner of 20 years had no idea that the priest at St. John Neumann Catholic Church in Gaithersburg, Md., would be a source of her grief… Johnson said the priest denied her Communion at her own mother’s funeral, telling her he couldn’t give it to her because she was gay.
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Did President Obama Support Infanticide?
In last week’s GOP debate, Newt Gingrich claimed that President Obama supported infanticide as an Illinois state senator. Here is the charge in Gingrich’s own words: You did not once in the 2008 campaign, not once did anybody in the elite media ask why Barack Obama voted in favor of legalizing infanticide. If we’re going to have a debate about who is the extremist on these issues, it is President Obama, who, as a state senator, voted to protect doctors who killed babies who survived the abortion. There are two key claims here: (1) that President Obama supported infanticide, and (2) that the media virtually ignored it in his run for…