Since 2014, President Obama has consistently underestimated ISIS. For example, in January of 2014, he characterized ISIS as the ?JV? team and that it ?was not a direct threat to us or something that we have to wade into.? Shortly before the horrific ISIS attack in Paris last week, he declared that ?I don?t think [ISIS] is gaining strength? for ?we have contained them.? However, ISIS recently blew up a Russian airliner over the Sinai, engineered a bombing in Lebanon, and has expanded into more than half-dozen countries?and then carried out the strategic and coordinated attack in Paris; the worst attack on Paris since World War II.

Life is about choices, both individual choices and institutional choices. Government is the most significant institution in most of our lives. It sets policy and then organizes resources, usually through taxation, to fund those policy choices. Throughout much of the world, governmental institutions and their political leaders believe that climate change is the result of human choices. Therefore, we must alter those individual choices so that climate warming will slow. Those governmental policy choices to effect individual, personal change will necessitate an enormous transfer of wealth and national treasure.

Bernie Sanders, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, has declared himself a democratic socialist, which means that he rejects capitalism. Sanders manifests a troubling development within the Democratic Party?a skepticism about or an outright rejection of capitalism. In socialism, generally, the means of production are owned by the public (i.e., the state) or by the workers, so that the state can provide a wide range of basic services (e.g., health care, education, child care, housing, energy, etc.) to its citizens free of charge or at a significant discount. This necessitates a redistribution of national income and wealth via the power of the state.

We live in a technological age in which science dominates our thinking and offers solutions to many of our fundamental problems. We depend on science and hold this discipline of human knowledge higher than we hold others (e.g., history, literature). At the end of the Scientific Revolution (the 17th century), Sir Isaac Newton synthesized the work of others with his own original thinking, and produced a compressive understanding of the laws of the physical world. We owe him much [. . .]

The events unfolding in the Middle East are of immense significance, but, with presidential politics, same-sex marriage debates and the news-as-entertainment phenomenon, most Americans are ignorant of these developments. For that reason, I am adding a second part to the Issues of a few weeks ago, ?What is Vladimir Putin doing in the Middle East??

In the early days of December in 1983, I received a call in my office from my father in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He shared with me the tragedy of my 23-year-old brother?s suicide. My brother knew Jesus as His Savior, but struggled much of his life with severe depression. At the low point in one of those cycles of depression, he took his life. As a family, we asked the typical questions: ?Why? What could we have done to prevent this? Why did we not see the signs? Why did we miss them?? Guilt, questioning, doubt in God?s goodness and grace naturally followed. These were some of the most difficult days of my life. But those days drove me to a deeper exploration of God?s goodness and His grace.

The role of evangelical Protestant Christianity in the development of America has been profound. The linkage between the First Great Awakening and the decision for independence from Great Britain is incontrovertible. Consequently, the desire for both political liberty and religious liberty energized the independence movement (see Thomas S. Kidd, God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution). Evangelical Christianity therefore maintained its location at American culture?s center until the waves of immigration began in the late 19th and into the early 20th centuries, when Protestant evangelicalism competed with Roman Catholicism and Judaism for the cultural center. Into the 20th century, especially after the immigration laws were changed in the 1960s, new religious faiths entered American culture, including Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, among others.

In the history of American foreign policy, presidents have consistently sought to impede Russian presence in the Middle East. In 1946, President Truman forced the USSR to withdraw from Iran. During the 1973 Yom Kippur War, President Nixon pressured the USSR when it began resupplying Arab clients. After the 1976 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, President Carter threatened military force if the Soviets went any farther. In August, Israel began warning the United States that Russia was planning a significant military deployment into Syria to prop up the Assad regime. That deployment has begun.

The visual images and the numbers are staggering: Hundreds of thousands of desperate people are fleeing the Middle East. . . Although most are fleeing war, some are fleeing poverty; and the majority of them are Muslim. The bulk of them are headed for Europe, principally seeking refuge in Germany and the Scandinavian countries. The total number of refugees or economic migrants from the nations above is in the millions. The Syria civil war alone has produced 4 million refugees, most of whom have fled to Jordan or Lebanon. But, increasingly they are heading for Europe where they hope to find prosperity, stability and hope. rpbc brochure.pdf

Modern medicine affirms a proposition that is quite consistent with God?s Word?that life is a continuum. (For the Christian, the Bible teaches that life extends from conception on into eternity, for all human beings will live forever.) The DNA strands present at conception are species-specific and the beginning of a new and unique individual human. . . Furthermore, the Bible also affirms consistently that humans are of infinite worth and value because they bear the image of God. Humans both resemble God and represent Him as stewards over His world. The life-as-continuum concept means that at all stages of development the human life is of value to God.