In late November 2019, my wife and I saw the movie, “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.” Arguably one of the best movies of 2019, it stars Tom Hanks as Fred Rogers, the host of the popular PBS program Mister Rogers’s Neighborhood, which aired from 1968 through 2001.
In Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” the dialogue between the ghost of Jacob Marley and Ebenezer Scrooge is most enlightening. As Scrooge protests Marley’s intervention, he declares that Marley “was always a good man of business,” to which Marley responds: “Business! . . . Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business: charity, mercy, forbearance, benevolence, were all my business.” The feverish materialism of the Christmas season seems to side with Scrooge’s miserly greed, not Marley’s redeemed perspective.
In 1947 C.S. Lewis published The Abolition of Man, in which he charted the “negation of human dignity in the name of progress.” He lived long enough to see the accuracy of his assessment: “For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please.” Historian Joseph Loconte of King’s College speaks of “an echo of another era of medical innovation amid moral ambiguity.”
A pro-life position involves consistency and an adherence to the value of human life at any stage in its development. Humans are valuable because they bear God’s image, which means both a fetus or a 90-year old are of infinite worth and value to God—and therefore to us. Fighting for pro-life consistency means fighting for children who need love and care, whether in the womb or as an infant. For that reason many evangelical Christians devote their lives to foster care, adoption and “similar services to vulnerable children.
Medical doctors are beginning to link the devastating wave of lung injuries and deaths to the vaping of marijuana. [Invented in China in the early 2000s, vaping refers to an “electronic cigarette,” which uses heating elements to vaporize liquids, usually containing nicotine, but now also containing an ingredient from marijuana.]
According to a recent study released by the Pew Research Center, the ranks of people who do not adhere to any faith in the US are growing and church attendance has fallen sharply. The Pew study demonstrates the triumph of personal autonomy and provides further confirmation that we are now living in a Postmodern, Post-Christian
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The American democratic experiment is in trouble. Founded on the principles of equality and liberty of all citizens before the law, the Constitution protects the “free exercise” of religious beliefs in the First Amendment. Throughout the history of this Republic, the national government has fought to protect the free exercise of religious beliefs.
Most church historians trace the birth of modern evangelicalism to the late 1940s into the early 1950s. Christian leaders such as Billy Graham, Carl Henry and Harold John Okenga, lamenting the separatism and anti-intellectualism of Fundamentalist leaders, organized an institutional separation from Fundamentalism.
One of the major themes of Issues in Perspective is that God’s Word gives humanity the insight, discernment, and resources to accurately analyze the human condition. A major conviction of cultural Christianity, which dominates much of evangelical Christianity today, is that politics is the answer to the human condition.
The United States had been negotiating with Turkey for months to establish a safe zone in the Middle East that would protect both Kurdish and Turkish interests, all the while maintaining the remarkable gains made against the Islamic State (ISIS). But, to the astonishment of everyone, after a phone call with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, President Trump ordered US troops to retreat from northern Syria.
