This week is Thanksgiving and it is appropriate in this edition of Issues in Perspective, to focus on Thanksgiving. To that end, I want to share a perspective on the Thanksgiving hymn, “We Gather Together.” Melanie Kirkpatrick of the Wall Street Journal offers an instructive history about this traditional hymn.
The 2024 election is, thankfully, behind us as a nation. We affirm the truth of Psalm 115:3: “Our God is in the heavens; He does all that He pleases.” [ESV] The local election results, the various state election results, and, of course, the national results are a demonstration of that mysterious tension found throughout Scripture of human responsibility and divine sovereignty: At the presidential level, Donald Trump was elected president because the people voted for him; Donald Trump is also president because God chose him to be president.
It is now conventional wisdom to argue that America is more polarized as a society in 2024 than it has been in its history, save the decade of the 1850s right before the Civil War. Why? There is no simple answer to this important question, but it is quite important as Christians that we seek to understand the nature of this polarization. The columnist and recent convert to Christianity, David Brooks, offers a most helpful analysis and overview of our polarized society.
Why have children? Why choose to become a parent? For much of human history, these two questions would probably have received significant pushback. Children were an obvious concomitant of marriage and, in many cases, of survival. But, today “only 26% of Americans say that having children is important for living a fulfilling life, whereas 71% consider ‘having a job or career they enjoy’ to be essential, and 61% say the same for ‘having close friends.’”
David Wallace-Wells of the New York Times observes that “War is on the rise everywhere. When the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London published its authoritative Armed Conflict Survey in early December, it counted 183 conflicts globally in 2023—higher than had been recorded in 30 years. The most remarkable episode of this harrowing new era of global violence is an astounding spate of military takeovers in what has come to be known as the coup belt, stretching uninterrupted across Africa’s Sahel from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea: six countries enduring 11 coup attempts, eight of them successful, since just 2020 . . .”
In early September, Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News star turned podcaster, hosted the podcaster “historian” Darryl Cooper on Carlson’s show “Tucker on X” on the social media platform. Carlson, who has hosted the show since Fox severed ties with him in 2023, introduced Mr. Cooper as “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.” It is rather appalling that such a major media figure would stoop so low and honor a man with such a perverted view of history. Both Carlson and Cooper are peddling deceit and lies and calling it “history.”
British historian, Fay Bound Alberti, co-founder of the Centre for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary University of London, writes that, “By the 21st century, loneliness has become ubiquitous. Commentators call it ‘an epidemic’, a condition akin to ‘leprosy’, and a ‘silent plague’ of civilization. In 2018, the United Kingdom went so far as to appoint a Minister for Loneliness. Yet loneliness is not a universal condition; nor is it a purely visceral, internal experience. It is less a single emotion and more a complex cluster of feelings, composed of anger, grief, fear, anxiety, sadness and shame. It also has social and political dimensions, shifting through time according to ideas about the self, God and the natural world.”
In 1968 presidential candidate, Hubert Humphrey, declared: “The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy, and the handicapped.” As a Christian, it is difficult for me to disagree with that statement.
If you believe that there is no God to which you are accountable or that there is no God who has provided redemption for you, you will live your life quite differently than one who affirms such propositions. Consider the famous British philosopher of the 20th century—Bertrand Russell, one of the founders of analytic philosophy. One of his most famous books was Why I Am Not a Christian. For Russell, there was no God.
As I have studied the Gospels over the years, I have been struck by how many times the text speaks of Jesus being “moved with compassion.” Jesus manifested compassion when He saw the crowds, responding with acts of healing (Matt. 14:14; 20:34; Mark 1:41), provision of food (Matt. 15:32), and teaching the word of God (Mark 6:34). Jesus not only modeled compassion; He also taught on the virtue of compassion, including the parable of the unforgiving servant (Matt. 18:23–35), the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29–37), and the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32).
