As with the issue of war, capital punishment is filled with intellectual and theological tension. In this Perspective, I am not defending how capital punishment is practiced in the United States or any other country. Instead, the focus is whether one can make a biblical defense for capital punishment as a responsibility of the state. If humans bear God’s image (Genesis 1:26-27), then ethically taking the life of an image-bearer in a premeditated act of murder demands just punishment, for killing a human being in such a manner is an attack on our Creator. It is a rejection of His sovereignty over human life (see Deuteronomy 32:39). But is it just to make the punishment capital?

My wife and I have two precious grandsons. They are a source of unsurpassed joy for us. But as grandparents, we frequently ask, with a degree of anxiety and apprehension: What does their future look like? What will become of them? Will they be men of character? Will they be successful? In the year 1809, parents and grandparents asked similar questions about these newborns: William Gladstone, Alfred Lloyd Tennyson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Edward Allan Poe, Charles Darwin, and Abraham Lincoln. That year the world was focused on Napoleon as his armies raced across Europe. Today, other than Waterloo (1815), can we name one other battle or triumph associated with Napoleon? But in the nurseries across Europe and America in 1809, what seemed inconsequential was actually the dawn of a new era.

George Herbert Walker Bush (1924-2018) died on Friday evening, 30 November 2018. He had a form of Parkinson’s disease that forced him to use a wheelchair or motorized scooter in recent years. He served as president from 1989 to 1993, capping a career of more than 40 years of public service. A decorated Navy pilot (compiling 126 carrier landings and 58 missions) who was shot down in the Pacific in 1944, he was the last of the World War II generation to serve as president. President Bush was a skilled negotiator and diplomat and, as president, helped end the Cold War and the threat of nuclear engagement with a careful handling of the Soviet Union’s collapse and the liberation of Eastern Europe. James A. Baker III, former Secretary of State, said of President Bush: “[He] was the best one term president the country has ever had, and one of the most underrated presidents of all time. I think history is going to treat him well.”

Science has always struggled with the scientific (technological) imperative: Just because science can do something does not mean it must do it. That imperative is now being tested by the gene editing technique known as CRISPR. For several years now, several scientists have warned of the day when the gene editing technique CRISPR would be used to create a genetically altered human being. Among other things, their concern was that that CRISPR would be misused to alter everything from eye color to IQ. For this reason many nations have banned CRISPR and any procedure that deliberately alters the genes of a human embryo.

The world order put together by the United States after World War II is unraveling. In the Middle East, nation states are disappearing, replaced by ancient tribalism and clan loyalties rooted deep in the region’s history. The benefits of open borders with lower tariffs and growing international trade are being challenged by a narrow nationalism, a dangerous isolationism and a short-sighted introversion. All aspects of the old order (e.g., the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, NATO and the European Union) are under siege with little or no public trust in that order. Because this old order was built on globalization, free trade and a commitment to democracy, the democracy part of the foundation is producing an unexpected tension between the leaders of the world and those being led. Upheaval, chaos, disorder and dysfunction now characterize our world. There is no better evidence of this unraveling than the relationship between China and the United States.

This is Thanksgiving weekend and it is appropriate in this edition of Issues in Perspective, to focus on Thanksgiving.  To that end, I want to concentrate on the Thanksgiving hymn, “We Gather Together.”  Melanie Kirkpatrick of the Wall Street Journal offers an instructive history about this traditional hymn.  The hymn, “We Gather Together” (“Wilt heden
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Vladimir Putin often repeats the claim that Russia and Ukraine are “one people.” Yet, his annexation of Crimea in 2014 and his subsequent “little war” in eastern Ukraine have pushed Orthodox religious folks in Ukraine farther away from his dream. What is his dream? Namely, to portray his government as a reincarnation of the old czarist empire where the Russian Orthodox Church served the interests of the Russian czar. Church and state were inextricably linked in czarist Russia. The Kremlin used the church as an instrument of its old imperial control. Putin has the same vision for Russia in 2018. But the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is not buying into Putin’s dream.

What is a citizen? When the Founders of this Republic wrote the Constitution during the summer of 1787, they did not include a definition of citizenship in the Constitution. During the early decades of the history of the American Republic, various laws were passed that heightened the ambiguity of what does citizenship mean and what are the requirements for citizenship?

Globally speaking, the church is at a significant crossroads right now. The geographical epicenter of our faith is shifting from its centuries-old epicenter in the northern hemisphere (e.g., Western Europe, the United States, Canada) to the southern hemisphere (e.g., Latin America, Africa, South Asia), where it continues to grow at astonishing rates. In his book The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South, Phillip Jenkins argues that 60% of the world’s population of Christians right now live in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. By 2050, we’ll see these numbers shift even further; estimates indicated that there will be approximately 3 billion Christians in the world, 75% of whom will live in the Global South.

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.”