Some Things Said

The Crystal Cathedral is in trouble. From today's WSJ: "Citing declining donations and $48 million in debt, Crystal Cathedral Ministries filed for bankruptcy protection this week, leaving a trail of hundreds of unpaid creditors from California to Washington, D.C. "According to filings in U.S. bankruptcy court in Santa Ana, the Southern California church has 550 creditors with claims ranging from $2 million owed to a Cincinnati-based bank that financed sound and stage equipment for the church's TV productions to $200…

"An expository sermon rises and falls on exegesis. Exegesis involves a thorough, analytical study of a biblical passage in order to develop a useful interpretation of the passage. Before we can preach any passage, we need to thoroughly understand it; exegesis is the process by which we determine the meaning." Paul D. Wegner, Using Old Testament Hebrew in Preaching: A Guide for Students and Pastors (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2009), 68-69. Absolutely right. I wish more would preach the text and…

In his new book Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults, Christian Smith writes: "[W]hen we interviewers tried to get respondents to talk about whether what they take to be substantive moral beliefs reflect some objective or universal quality or standard [or] are simply relative human inventions, many if not most could not understand what we interviewers were trying to get at." That is, not only are they moral relativists, they can't conceive of a moral…

Disintegration “The genius of America in the early nineteenth century, Tocqueville thought, was that it pursued ‘productive industry’ without a descent into lethal materialism. Behind America's balancing act, the pioneering French social thinker noted, lay a common set of civic virtues that celebrated not merely hard work but also thrift, integrity, self-reliance, and modesty–virtues that grew out of the pervasiveness of religion, which Tocqueville called ‘the first of [America's] political institutions, . . . imparting morality’ to American democracy and…

Last night the Congress passed the Climate Change Bill. At 1,800 pages plus, and as they had just initially received it mid afternoon; it was simply not possible that any of them, any of their staff members, or anyone else could have possibly read the thing and noted any details before the vote. This is the latest empirical evidence ( and yes, it is anecdotal) that no one reads, or does any research on much of anything. It seems some…

Not Relativity... One of the chief tenets of postmodernism is relativism - the notion that neither morality nor wisdom is absolute and definable, but instead simply predicated on what those with power and advantage say they are. -- Victor Davis Hanson Where human governments (even the best of those) all tend... I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Over…