This Sunday’s sermon at the church I visited was on Joshua 5:13-15:
Now when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went up to him and asked, “Are you for us or for our enemies?”
I’ve noted the recent rash of books roughly on the theme of the danger of theocracy. As though in (indirect) response, several books celebrating Christianity’s impact on Western civilization (and democracy) have appeared. There was Thomas Woods’ How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization. Then there was Rodney Stark’s The Victory of Reason, about which others have commented in this venue. Now there is Robert Royal’s The God that Did Not Fail: How Religion Built and Sustains the West.
I just completed an interview that will air this Sunday on the Michigan Talk Network about state-run lotteries and Christian views on gambling for the “Michigan Gaming and Casino Show,” hosted by Ron Pritchard.
Let me lead in here by saying I’m not by nature an overly emotional or "pentecostal" guy (lowercase ‘p’), though I have known personally the transforming movement of God’s Holy Spirit in my life and the lives of others at particular times.
Read more on Let’s Tend the Garden 2006, Vineyard Church, Boise ID…
One of the flashpoints in school choice debates is the performance of public schools as compared to private. A while back a Department of Education study drew attention by claiming that, when certain socio-economic factors were controlled, there wasn’t much of a difference between achievement by public and private school students. Those findings are now under fire from Harvard researchers Paul Petersen and Elena Llaudet, who use the same data but a different method—and claim that the Department of Education’s method was flawed.
This story makes me think of an old joke. Stafford, TX has a population of 19,227 people and 51 churches. The city council is making noise about preventing any more churches from opening up because, as tax-exempt organizations, they are threatening the viability of the local government.
To conclude this series, let’s recap what is meant by natural law by parsing the term.
The “nature” referred to in natural law can mean different things, but I mean by it the divinely engrafted knowledge of morality in human reason and conscience, that which all human beings share by virtue of their creation in God’s image. Theologically speaking, I think this understanding of nature points back to our original creation in God’s image, but it also anticipates the fall into sin, where the divine image was corrupted but not destroyed.
Might these be the new “Cuisinarts of the sea”? This story, “Energy from the Restless Sea,” in today’s NYT examines the efforts of experimental inventors to find machines that excel in “harnessing the perpetual motion of the ocean and turning it into a commodity in high demand: energy.” There are a variety of designs and types of machines, so of course not all of them are a danger to chop up hapless fish.
Almost everyone has been critical of the government’s methods when it comes to disaster preparedness and response.
We here at Acton also tend to be very focused on the importance of private enterprise when it comes to dealing with local problems.
