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Born-Again Babies

Seeing our five sons, strangers in the grocery store ask us, “Do you know what is causing that?” What other times and other cultures considered a small family now looks like a television reality show. More surprising are the comments we often receive from fellow Evangelicals, usually the older . . . . Continue Reading »

Mean Christianity

Last week, Kimberly Hyatt of Patheos asked why Christians are mean in “Look at the Christians: See How Mean They Are” . “Perhaps it is past time for us to stop focusing on what others are doing or trying to do and start taking responsibility for our own actions and their . . . . Continue Reading »

Life on the Divide

On a typical afternoon, I drop off my eight-year-old daughter and her best friend at ballet lessons and return home to meet my five-year-old son’s friend for a “play date.” Their mothers and I appear to have everything in common. We all order our children’s clothes from the same upscale . . . . Continue Reading »

Robert George’s Electric Question

So here’s a link to the question Pete’s been talking about, the one the mighty Robert George posed to Ron Paul on the 14th amendment. The whole thing’s a good taste of Paul for those unfamiliar, but George begins right at 17 minutes in. This is a good format for Paul, and I was . . . . Continue Reading »

Proper Thought About the Unborn Child

From Francis Canavan’s The Pluralist Game:If we take the principles of liberal individualism as axiomatic, we find it possible to think of the fetus and the woman as the parties of the first and second part arguing over their respective rights.  We are then able to blind ourselves to the . . . . Continue Reading »

On the Demise of Fatherhood

It is news to no one that, in the Western world in general and the United States in particular, the call to fatherhood is being heeded less and less. Anyone unfortunate enough to pick up a newspaper is painfully aware that one-third of American children live without any father and that, in many inner cities, the out-of-wedlock birth rate exceeds seventy percent. Also well known, though rarely acknowledged, is the devastation that such a lack of paternity has wreaked on children and society more generally. Fatherless children have rates of incarceration, criminal activity, possession of firearms, poverty, drug and alcohol abuse, teen pregnancy, incompletion of school, and overall parental neglect and maltreatment alarmingly higher than their two-parent counterparts.

Coupled with the staggering divorce rate and the move in the West toward alternative lifestyles”permanent bachelorhood, cohabitation, or “serial monogamy””it is now possible, without the slightest exaggeration, to begin using phrases such as “the end of the human family.” Continue Reading »

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