A Sacred Schizophrenia by John Piper

I want to make plain to all the graduates today that, if you are a Christian, you will spend the rest of your life on this earth with a spiritual condition that may be called sacred schizophrenia.

The second definition of schizophrenia in my dictionary, after the medical one, is “a state characterized by the coexistence of contradictory or incompatible elements.” That’s what I mean by schizophrenia. In calling it sacred I mean that it is a condition brought about by the Holy Spirit. It is not a perfect condition, but it is a holy condition. A sacred schizophrenia. https://world.wng.org/2017/05/a_sacred_schizophrenia

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How Do Christians Fit Into the Two-Party System? They Don't by Tim Keller

What should the role of Christians in politics be? More people than ever are asking that question. The historical Christian positions on social issues don’t match up with contemporary political alignments.

Christians cannot pretend they can transcend politics and simply “preach the Gospel.” Those who avoid all political discussions and engagement are essentially casting a vote for the social status quo. American churches in the early 19th century that did not speak out against slavery because that was what we would now call “getting political” were actually supporting slavery by doing so. To not be political is to be political.

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Anthony Kennedy and the Privatization of Meaning by David Brooks

America’s founders certainly believed in individual liberty, but they believed that liberty happens within a shared community. They began the Constitution with the phrase, “We the People.” We are all one thing — a people, a nation, a collective.

That people shares a moral order — rules that are true for all people in all times and that govern us in our freedom. Among them, for example, is the idea that all people are created equal.

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CrossFit Is My Church by Tara Isabella Burton

How fitness classes provide the meaning that religion once did.

Institutions like CrossFit and SoulCycle are offering their students more than just a chance to lose weight or tone up. They function, ter Kuile argues, like religions.

“People come because they want to lose weight or gain muscle strength, but they stay for the community,” he said. “It’s really the relationships that keep them coming back.”

Of course, these spaces are themselves defined not just by their spiritual role but by their economic one. At up to $40 a class, places like SoulCycle and CrossFit often cater to a particular demographic: urban millennials with high-paying jobs and disposable incomes, the same group that tends to identify as religiously unaffiliated.

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The Necessary Fear by Todd R. Flanders

What is said today about ‘fear’ of the Lord in Biblical language is true,” Father Ernest Fortin told his graduate students at Boston College. “It does bear the meanings ‘awe’ and ‘reverence.’  We shouldn’t forget, though, that the word also means fear.” This was the mid-nineties, when John Paul II’s Veritatis Splendor had recently re-presented the Church’s teaching on moral law. There are “intrinsically evil acts” that “radically contradict the good of the person made in his image,” wrote the pope. “They are [evil] always and per se.”

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Love Sees with New Eyes by Peter Kreeft

There is a dimension of truth which most of us have tragically lost and need to recover, a dimension that cannot be put into words and sentences, though words and sentences can be used to suggest it.

All premodern societies had this other dimension, even the ones who were very far from having the propositional truth, the Christian content of revelation. This other dimension is a vision, a perspective, a habit of seeing rather than a specific thing seen. If we do not have this habit—this vision—then our theology will not sink much deeper than on a conscious, rational level.

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God and Men and Jordan Peterson by Ross Douthat

The men fled; the women stayed.

That’s the story of Easter weekend in the New Testament. Most of Jesus’ male disciples vanished when the trouble started, leaving his mother and Mary Magdalene and other women to watch by the cross, prepare his body for his burial, and then (with the men still basically in hiding) find the empty tomb.

Male absence and female energy has also been the story, albeit less starkly and dramatically, of Christian practice in many times and places since. Today, most Christian churches and denominations in America — conservative as well as liberal, male-led and female-led both — have some sort of gender gap, sometimes modest but often stark. Despite their varying theologies, evangelicalism, mainline Protestantism, Mormonism and Catholicism all have about a 55-45 female-male split in religious identification; for black churches, it’s 60-40.

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The Pilgrim's Myth by Holt West

Stories in general, and mythologies in particular, allow us to explore the
complexities of life, death, and the human experience in a nuanced way. This is, no
doubt, why Christ spoke to the masses in parables. Myths, however, run deeper than
simple narrative; they are formative for us as individuals and as communities as we
examine the world around us. Even the myths from which we are far removed culturally
and temporally captivate us in ways that mere facts cannot. Myths bridge the gap
between impersonal, abstract concepts and the more personal experience of daily life. As
we each look for our own niche in the world, a place we can call home, it is clear that
mythology is essential.

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Madeline L'Engle, C.S. Lewis, and Christianity: Moving Beyond Collectivism and Individualism by Jordan Ballor

The Christian quest for the common good is not reducible either to the simple aggregate of individual goods or to the promotion of the needs of the collective at the expense of the one.

The one and the many is perhaps the oldest problem of human experience. In social thought, this problem manifests itself in the tension between collectivism and individualism.

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When Truth and Reason Are No Longer Enough by Alison Gopnik

I'm a scientist at UC Berkeley—a card-carrying true believer in liberal Enlightenment values. Imagine that I meet a bright young woman in a small town in Wisconsin or Alabama, and that I want to persuade her to become a scientist like me. “Listen, science is really great!,” I say. “We scientists care about truth and reason and human flourishing. We include people from every country and culture. And our values have transformed the world. For thousands of years before the Enlightenment, the speed limit was the pace of a fast horse, and children died all the time. Now ideas move at the speed of light, and a child’s death is an unthinkable tragedy. Democracy has eclipsed tyranny, prosperity has outpaced poverty, medicine has routed illness, individual liberation has uprooted social convention. Come join us!”

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The Sin of Tolerance by Billy Graham

One of the pet words of this age is "tolerance." It is a good word, but we have tried to stretch it over too great an area of life. We have applied it too often where it does not belong. The word "tolerant" means "liberal," "broad-minded," "willing to put up with beliefs opposed to one's convictions," and "the allowance of something not wholly approved."

Tolerance, in one sense, implies the compromise of one's convictions, a yielding of ground upon important issues. Hence, over-tolerance in moral issues has made us soft, flabby and devoid of conviction.

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Let’s Ban Porn by Ross Douthat

In this weekend’s New York Times Magazine there is a long profile of a new kind of pedagogy unique to our particular stage of civilization. It’s called “porn literacy,” and it involves explaining to young people whose sexual coming-of-age is being mediated by watching online gangbangs that actually hard-core pornography is not an appropriate guide to how the sexes should relate.

For anyone who grew up with the ideals of post-sexual revolution liberalism, there is a striking pathos to these educators’ efforts. The sex education programs in my mostly liberal schools featured a touching faith from the adults in charge that they were engaged in a great work of enlightenment, that with the right curricula they could roll back the forces of repression and make sexuality a place of egalitarian pleasure and safety for us all.

Compared to those idealists, the people teaching “porn literacy” have accepted a sweeping pedagogical defeat. They take for granted that the most important sex education may take place on Pornhub, that the purpose of their work is essentially remedial, and that there is no escape from the world that porn has made.

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The Sign of Jonah by Daniel Siedell

Jonah is the only one in the parable that that Lord has a problem with. He receives no resistance from nature:  the sea, the winds, the giant fish, the vine that grows then dies, all obey His Word.  He also receives no resistance from the Gentiles: the sailors repent and believe and the entire city of Nineveh, including their king, repents and believes. Only Jonah resists the word of the Lord.  [...]

The parable is about our willingness to serve the Lord in the manner He intended.  And what does He intend? He intends for Jonah, for Israel, for the Church, and for us individually, to live for those around us.  We are embodiments of God's presence in and for the world.

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Respecting Life in a Time of Transgender Robots and ‘Pet Parents’ by Anna Abbott

Something's wrong when AI and animals can be treated as human, while actual unborn humans are deemed worthless.

Respecting life is complicated in a culture that has problems comprehending “respect” and “life.” When people are called “pet parents” and artificial intelligence is considered human, human life itself is contested. Not to mention the fact that inanimate objects are called “sexy” and “smart.” This year marks the 50th anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae, and threats to life have increased and changed. Humanae Vitae predicted abortion and euthanasia, as well as the moral decadence in relationships between the sexes.

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Political Pelagianism by Marvin Olasky

The theology behind both Democratic and Republican lawmaking

Pelagius (A.D. 360-418) denied Biblical teaching about original sin. He thought people could do good without being born again. Allies and opponents described him as highly educated, fluent in Latin and Greek, and portly. (The theologian Jerome, an ascetic, described Pelagius as “stuffed with Irish porridge.”)

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