Pilgrim’s Progress

From WORLD Magazine’s website:

“To make a (way too long) story short, Gilbert (who is actually a great writer), spent months on the bathroom floor crying out to an ambiguous god/being/universe/Jiminy Cricket, begging for communion. She decides, after one particularly emotional episode, to take a year off to find him/her. She just wants God, she says, more and more of Him. Filled up and flowing over. The rub, being, of course, that she isn’t looking for God as much as she’s trying to create Him from scratch:

“I think you have every right to cherry pick when it comes to moving your spirit and finding peace in God. I think you are free to search for any metaphor whatsoever which will take you across the worldly divide whenever you need to be transported or comforted. . . . If humanity never evolved in its exploration of the divine, a lot of us would still be worshiping golden, Egyptian statues of cats. And this evolution of religious thinking does involve a fair amount of cherry-picking. . . . That’s me in the corner, in other words. That’s me in the spotlight. Choosing my religion.”

“Sounds more like a kid in a Build-a-Bear store than a spiritual quest—but with more fluff.”

Me: Save $10 and skip the movie. Save $20 and skip the book. Read the rest of the review here.

Over the weekend, Glenn Beck held a rally on the National Mall at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The political left, of course, hated every minute of it. Russell Moore, Dean of the School of Theology and Senior Vice-President for Academic Administration at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, though, was unimpressed for other reasons and posted this very thought-provoking article on the event. It’s so chock full of great quotes that if I tried to sample them, I’d likely end up pasting the entire article, so head over to russellmoore.com and read the entire article yourself. I will, though, at the risk of “ruining” it for you, quote his closer, because it’s a good one:

It’s sad to see so many Christians confusing Mormon politics or American nationalism with the gospel of Jesus Christ. But, don’t get me wrong, I’m not pessimistic. Jesus will build his church, and he will build it on the gospel. He doesn’t need American Christianity to do it. Vibrant, loving, orthodox Christianity will flourish, perhaps among the poor of Haiti or the persecuted of Sudan or the outlawed of China, but it will flourish.

And there will be a new generation, in America and elsewhere, who will be ready for a gospel that is more than just Fox News at prayer.

Feel free to comment below.

A U.S. district court issued a preliminary injunction on Monday stopping federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research, in a slap to the Obama administration’s new guidelines on the sensitive issue.

Read more here.

From C.S. Lewis’ The Scretape Letters:

“The game is to have them running about with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under… Cruel ages are put on their guard against Sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against Respectability, lecherous ones against Puritanism; and whenever all men are really hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.”

-Demon “Screwtape” to his understudy “Wormwood”

“It is a strange thing that if the old evangelistic doctrines should appear for one moment to be beaten in debate, they always conquer in results.”

Charles Spurgeon

All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.

C.S. Lewis

“The Christian idea of marriage is based on Christ’s words that a man and wife are to be regarded as a single organism–He was not expressing a sentiment but stating a fact, just as one if stating a fact when one says that a lock and its key are one mechanism, or that a violin and a bow are one musical instrument. The inventor of the human machine was telling us that its two halves, the male and the female, were made to be combined together in pairs, not simply on the sexual level, but totally combined.”

C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity

A recent conversation I had has gotten me thinking about Jackie Gleason, who died in 1987. Although I was only in my early teens, something he said really struck me as not quite right. As best as I can remember (I can’t find the quote online), he said in one of his last interviews, knowing he was dying of cancer, something to the effect of “I can’t believe in a God who would send me to hell.” Whether or not that was his exact quote, that’s a common sentiment these days, and is just as wrong now as was back then. Read the rest of this entry »

New York Times Magazine has a new piece that every pro-life person ought to read. Called ‘The New Abortion Providers‘, the piece shows has the medical community has silently trained a new general of doctors to provide abortions outside the context of abortion clinics, as part of their regular medical practices.

Below are pictures of two doctors, “Dr. Rachael Phelps (left), an alumna of the Family Planning Fellowship. Dr. Emily Godfrey (right), whose specialty is family medicine, with a patient undergoing a routine checkup.” Hardly the monstrous-looking depictions of abortion-providers we heard of in the 80s and 90s.

While the pro-life movement celebrates the closing of abortion clinics–and we should–the pro-choice movement, says the NY Times piece, feels just fine about the trend.

It’s a must read piece to understand the new landscape of the pro-life struggle in America. And it makes me all the more thankful for pro-life doctors who stay true to the pledge to “do no harm.”

Gregory Koukl of Stand to Reason offers an informed, yet brief, synopsis of a important third way between Calvinism and Arminianism: Molinism.