The Chimpanzees’ Day in Court

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Hercules and Leo have been kept under lock and key by the State University of New York for locomotion studies. Tuesday was Hercules’ and Leo’s court date, where New York Supreme Court Judge Barbara Jaffe heard arguments about whether the University has violated their rights by detaining […]

MTD: The “Whatever” Religion

You may be asking, “What is MTD?” MTD stands for “moralistic therapeutic deism.” Sociologist Christian Smith of the University of North Carolina coined the phrase in 2005 to describe the basic religion of many teenagers in America in our day. ((“On ‘Moralistic Therapeutic Deism’ as U.S. Teenagers’ Actual, Tacit, De Facto Religious Faith,” Princeton Theological […]

Do Bible Topics Get Too Old?

Once in 1893, the great preacher and scholar, J.W. McGarvey, was preaching on baptism. ((McGarvey’s Sermons (Delight: Gospel Light, n.d.), 109-121.)) He began by noting that many people in his audience might think it strange for him to focus on a topic that religious teachers have covered so many times without producing a general consensus. If many preachers […]

Life in View of Death

The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, in his famous Meditations, wondered at the fact that death ironically visited even the most renowned and powerful luminaries: Hippocrates after curing many diseases himself fell sick and died. the Chalaei foretold the deaths of many, and then fate caught them too. Alexander, and Pompeius, and Caius Caesar, after so […]

What the Devil Wants Us to Do

Dr. Thomas B. Warren, the great Christian preacher and philosopher, once preached a sermon about the various things that the devil desires for us to do and to become. I have adapted Warren’s remarks here, showing that the devil has a multi-layered plan for us: Initially the devil wants us to be atheists, because he […]

Learning to Slide

Robert Griffin III, oft-running quarterback for the Washington Redskins, is in his third NFL season and still regularly takes big hits from defenders when he runs. Other quarterbacks are more likely to slide, but Griffin tends to stay upright and get pummeled. His coach, Jay Gruden, has been concerned with Griffin’s failure to “get down,” […]

When You Go Back to School

I seem to go back to school every fall for at least one course. Not a single semester (or six-week period, or quarter, or whatever) has been wasted, because every time I learned something that I really needed to know. Sometimes students in school learn things that are very specialized and that not everybody needs […]

Christian Discrimination

In college one of my majors was broadcasting. As my classmates and I studied the media we learned, from the southern scholar Richard Weaver, that there are certain words or phrases that carry good thoughts or feelings beyond their literal meaning, and certain phrases that carry negative associations in the same way. ((See Joseph A. […]

A Lesson from a Lost Phone Charger

If you’re like me, your cell phone is like an appendage. People call us, text us, send us Facebook messages and tweets, and so it seems the phone is always beckoning. Recently, I was traveling to hold a gospel meeting, and I realized that I had left my phone charger at home. I instantly started […]

Leave It to the Experts?

A friend of mine (call him Bob) recently told me that, when it comes to religious doctrine, he lets the experts tell him what’s true. After all, Bob says, the experts have spent years learning how to interpret the Bible, and so we can trust them to tell us the what the Bible says. Bob […]

- 2024

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