Just a quick technical update. Today I set up a twitter account for our blog here. At the very least, when a blog entry is posted, a link will be tweeted. There’s an outside chance we’ll post some manual tweets. To follow us, go here. That is all.
You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January 2009.
Amid the backdrop of news stories on Guatanamo Bay detention camp’s future, and the runaway popularity of the show “24,” I bring up the said question.
A couple years back, Christianity Today published an important column on the piece entitled, “5 Reasons Torture Is Always Wrong: And why there should be no exceptions.”
We could debate all day what defines torture, but it seems to me it’s one of those things that is hard to put into words, but you know it when you see it. We could further debate if waterboarding qualifies as “torture.”
Setting aside specifics, I see no biblical or moral grounds in which the ends justify these means of torture in itself. But what do you think?
On a lighter note, Jay Leno quipped that with Obama doing away with any and all forms of torture, perhaps ABC’s The View might soon be cancelled. One can only hope.
Thanks to Ross Douthat for this link:
The number one reason why Barak Obama disappoints me in his taking the Office of President of the United States is his future decisions to diminish the progress done on pro-life issues.
As reported, President Obama will lift the ban on funding for groups providing abortions overseas. This comes as no surprise, but it is still a sad moment.
Dear friends, please pray that there could still be hope for abortion practices to be lessened in spite of the President’s decisions.
The Internet Monk, which, I have to confess, I just heard of today so I don’t know much about him, has a pretty good analysis of the two prayers given at today’s inaugural. My favorite quote is this:
You can’t talk reasonably and genuinely about a God of many understandings. Not with actual believers in Jesus, Yahweh, Allah and Buddah around. You might as well pray to the cat. (It probably would be better to pray to the cat.) But you can talk about the God who created, the God who reigns and the God we know as we know and believe Jesus.
The indispensable Christian journal, First Things, has an interesting piece on pro-life politics. It begins:
It happens every four years—maybe every two years: Anytime there’s an election in this country, the pundits and political experts take to their soapboxes and proclaim the death of pro-life politics. The unwashed yokels in Utah, Alabama, South Dakota, Oklahoma: They’re an embarrassment, you see, and the sooner we stop paying attention to them, the sooner the nation’s politics will regain its equilibrium.
Are pro-life politics yesterday’s news? Read the rest here.
President-elect Barack Obama ignited a firestorm of controversy with some by allowing Rick Warren to voice a prayer during his inauguration. More controversial, I think, though certainly less-covered, is a similar selection of homosexual Episcopal priest Gene Robinson. Matt Barber, director of cultural affairs with Liberty Counsel and associate dean with Liberty University School of Law, discusses this selection in his short but poignant column, “Obama betrays Christian voters.” He makes a really good point, with some really good zingers (“After that comment, I wonder if he heard a rooster crow.”). It’s a short piece, so I’d encourage you to read it, and by all means, pray for our next president, and pray for Gene Robinson.
“In sum, while an alarming number of Western Christians suppose they can achieve physical and spiritual well-being through a form of yoga divorced from its Eastern worldview, the reality is that attempts to Christianize Hinduism only Hinduize Christianity.”
- Hank Hanegraff, adding to a carefully documented three-part series entitled, “The Yoga Boom, A Call for Christian Discernment.”
Touchstone magazine has a must-read column on the devastating effects of divorce, covering it from numerous angles you do not normally see. It begins:
The decline of the family has now reached critical and truly dangerous proportions. Family breakdown touches virtually every family and every American. It is not only the major source of social instability in the Western world today but also seriously threatens civic freedom and constitutional government.
G. K. Chesterton once observed that the family serves as the principal check on government power, and he suggested that someday the family and the state would confront one another. That day has arrived.
Read the rest here.
In a not quite accurately titled article (I would expect the top pro-abortion moment to be Obama’s election ; ), American Life League has an interesting, if not depressing, run down of some the more appalling quotes from pro-abortion advocates in 2008. You can see the whole list here, but I’d like to point one out in particular:
Comedian Doug Stanhope
These are not empty words. I, Doug Stanhope, am offering you, Bristol Palin, the sum of $25,000 so that you can abort your child and move out of that draconian home. I have also set up a PayPal link so that others around the world can help increase this amount to ease the burden of starting out on your own at such an early age.
While it’s a pretty despicable comment, what I find interesting is how he phrased things: “..abort your unborn child…” In making the statement, he seems to be implicitly accepting the pro-life stance that the unborn is indeed a human child, but still offers to pay to kill it. Pretty chilling.
For Christmas this year, I received not one but two copies of Do the Right Thing by Mike Huckabee — one from my mother-in-law and another from a friend.
The irony of this is I attempted to purchase the book for my mother, and it was sold out (though I noticed this particular popular bookstore was well stocked with multiple books on Obama, as well as many liberal authors).
Since I’m in the middle of reading four different books, I’m only on chapter four, but already I’m convinced this is one of the best books I have ever read, mostly because of one profound paragraph. Read the rest of this entry »
That is what I’m doing today. Will try and muster up some blogs worth reading soon…
“Richard John Neuhaus, 72, editor-in-chief of First Things, president of the Institute on Religion and Public Life, and author of numerous books, died Thursday morning in New York City.”
WORLD magazine correctly noted, “Protestant evangelicals have lost a friend who himself was Roman Catholic.” Read more.
“When history looks back to this era it should recognize this generation as one which cared about human beings enough to halt the practice of war, to provide a decent living for every family, and to fulfill its responsibility to its children from the very moment of conception.”
Ted Kennedy
August 3, 1971
(hat tip: BTD)
Here’s to a happy new year. Our prayer is that we truly make it the year of our Lord.