The Tulsa race massacre (aka the Black Wall Street Massacre, the Greenwood Massacre) took place 31 May and 1 June 1921, when mobs of white residents, many of them deputized and given weapons by city officials, attacked Black residents and businesses in the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma. It marks one of “the single worst incident(s) of racial violence in American history.”
Senior columnist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Ari Shavit, has written that the 20th century was “the most dramatic century in the dramatic history of the Jews. In its first half, we lost a third of our people. But the second half of the century was miraculous. In North America, we created the perfect diaspora, while in the land of Israel we established modern Jewish sovereignty. The Jews of the 21st century have today what their great-grandparents could only dream of: equality, freedom, prosperity, dignity.
President Joe Biden is the second Roman Catholic president in American history. Biden attends Mass every Sunday and on Catholic holy days, and he regularly prays the rosary (a series of meditative prayers) using rosary beads that belonged to his son Beau. He wears his Catholicism on his sleeve and is not afraid of publically affirming his personal faith. Furthermore, Biden oversees a government with an unprecedented representation of the Catholic Church
That the American family is in crisis is a given in this Postmodern, Post-Christian culture. Conservative columnist David Brooks provides a salient summary of the profound change in the American family: “If you want to summarize the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this: We’ve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We’ve made life better for adults but worse for children. We’ve moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children), which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options.
More biographies have been written about Jesus than any other historical figure. The book that defines His nature, His character and His mission—the Bible—is annually the number-one-seller. No one’s teaching has had a deeper impact on culture, politics, morality, justice, philosophy, and human character than Jesus. He is habitually quoted, even by secular world leaders. Indeed, in a recent book by British historian, Tom Holland, Jesus and His movement called Christianity, are characterized as “the most subversive revolution in human history, whose legacy is the ongoing disruption of settled patterns of life.”
Central to biblical theology is the axiom of human depravity—that humans are born sinners and are capable of profound and confounding evil. The existence of such darkness affects human optimism, hope and certainty about the future. Furthermore, the current embrace of Postmodern autonomy has deteriorated into the famous refrain from the book of Judges: “Every [person] is doing what is right in his/her own eyes.” There is no longer an acceptance of absolute truth, universal ethical standards or a serious commitment to human dignity.
The French Republic has experienced egregious acts of terror over the last decade and the government of Emmanuel Macron and the French Parliament have decided to be proactive in dealing with Muslim separatism, which the government declares is a factor in terroristic violence. A bill now being debated throughout French society intends to enforce the country’s principles of secularism by gaining greater control over Muslim and other religious organizations and by restricting home and private schooling. Central to this debate and to this bill is the French commitment to laicite, a term loosely defined as secularism, the bedrock of the country’s political system for more than a century.
The intersection of digital technology and the church is a profoundly important issue in the 21st century. The COVID pandemic has resulted in an explosion of livestreaming church services, with Zoom being the preferred platform for board meetings, Bible studies, mentoring sessions, etc. Digital technology has therefore enabled the church to continue its various ministries during this deadly pandemic; we must be thankful to the Lord for this manifestation of His grace. But digital technology that accesses the various forms of social media has had a deleterious impact on the “flock” of the typical church. I want to address both aspects of the digital revolution and its impact on the church.
The darkness of Postmodern, post-Christian American culture permeates our thinking about two fundamental axioms of the Christian faith—the sanctity of marriage and the sanctity of life. Both axioms of our faith are being challenged and both confront our consistency as Christians as we proclaim the infallible truth of God’s Word to a culture that is not listening.
Over the last decade, the West has seen China emerge as a formidable economic power; its GDP is second only to the United States. When Western leaders welcomed China into the world trading system in 2001, many believed that China would automatically become freer as it became richer. When that did not occur, the Trump administration believed that coercion, high tariffs and sanctions would change China’s behavior. That has not worked either. Few doubt that the greatest foreign policy and economic challenge facing the US is China. How should we think about the growing economic powerhouse, which also seeks military domination of Asia as well?
