Unconditional affirmation and unconditional love are not the same thing. To demand the former is to actually exclude the latter.
Sam Allberry
Category: Contemporary Issues (Page 6 of 8)
The cultivation of consumer spirituality is the antithesis of a sacrificial, “deny yourself” congregation. A consumer church is an antichrist church.
Eugene Peterson
Alan Jacobs has re-cycled an excellent essay he wrote ten years ago as a column for the late lamented Books & Culture. He found what he had to say then particularly apropos to the present day. I don’t recall reading it 10 years ago, so maybe I missed that early edition of Books & Culture; but I’m very glad Jacobs decided to reprint this essay on his blog. Give it a read here.
Quoting Miroslav Volf:
We are in a major crisis of legitimacy and trust. No better time to renew commitment to trustworthiness, as individuals and communities.
Well said.
Here are the raw numbers we have to account for in our failed health care system.
Highlights.
We spend more PUBLIC money on healthcare than comparable countries with national health care systems. When you add the private money in, we spend enormously more money on health care than countries with national health care systems. I mean really enormously more!
Ask regular people with national health care if they like it. They will gripe about it. Every system has limitations.
Ask regular people with national health care if they would trade it for the American system. They would not.
Rich people should be able to use their resources to get the health care they want. Regular people need something a whole lot more like national health care in these other countries than what we have now.
If we were reasonable, we could spend less than now and get better care and cover everyone. Less GDP than now, and less GDP than France – who is already less than us. The numbers are clear. They are not complicated. They are enormously unfavorable to us and our system. They are unfavorable for any system currently under serious consideration in Washington. It is a scandalous failure of our politics and society.
“The problem of sexual confusion in our culture, which is huge, is not going to be solved by the reassertion of power.” Thus says the wise and learned Sarah Williams in these talks given at Corban University, which I cannot recommend highly enough. Williams is a first-rate scholar and does us a great service in explaining the world from which our present day came and how we got here, with regard to how we think of people and sex. I don’t know much about Corban University; but Sarah Williams I have read and listened to quite a lot over the past couple of years, to my great profit. Such great free resources are not so easy to find! This one is top notch.
Sex in the Postmodern Story, Part 1
Sex in the Postmodern Story, Part 2
Sex in the Postmodern Story, Part 3
Judah got in a lot of trouble for depending on Assyria to protect them from the Israel/Aram coalition. And then Judah got in a lot of trouble for looking to Babylon to protect them from the Assyrians. Later, Judah got in a lot of trouble for depending on Egypt to protect them from the Babylonians. And so it goes.
People of God, vote for whomever you can vote with a clear conscience and then stand by without shame as a leader without being an embarrassment to God. But remember: #WeDontNeedEitherOne
There is no candidate running who will usher in the kingdom of God or prevent its coming.
Finally, Isaiah 30:1-3 is apropos:
Woe to the obstinate children,â€
declares the LORD,
“to those who carry out plans that are not mine,
forming an alliance, but not by my Spirit,
heaping sin upon sin;
who go down to Egypt
without consulting me;
who look for help to Pharaoh’s protection,
to Egypt’s shade for refuge.
But Pharaoh’s protection will be to your shame,
Egypt’s shade will bring you disgrace.
[NIV]
I’m not a particular fan of Bill Gates. However in this interview of Bill Gates from the Atlantic, Gates quite reasonably expresses the need to increase the rate of development for new energy sources (by a lot) because of climate change with less drama and more sense than is found in most such comments.
The interesting thing to me is that this article has created quite a buzz. But the buzz is not about the central ideas of the article. It’s about Bill Gates sidebar comments that he doesn’t think the free market is good at every kind of technological advance or every allocation of resources. The buzz is that Bill Gates is against free markets and has come out as a socialist!
Whether the article is meritorious on its own terms or not, this is sheer and utter nonsense. It prevents actual discussion of substance because the discussion is hijacked by hot button political issues. What Gates actually said isn’t being discussed. His comment on free markets is the only thing.
And that is where our public discourse is today. It’s so ridden with land mine hot button issues that you can’t even discuss anything. And if you happen to miss one of the mines and some interest is offended, they throw you and all your good ideas and labor away because of the one thing you said that made you an offender. That’s a recipe for permanent social adolescence. One can make no mistakes (if they are mistakes) or we’ll replace you with someone else who hasn’t done anything we could possibly be upset about. That’s no way to live.
In The World is not Ours to Save, Tyler Wigg-Stevenson recommends for those who follow Jesus
“enduring, kingdom-oriented activism grounded in the faithfulness of vocation instead of the anxiety of a broken world.”
From a David Brooks TED talk:
- 95% of profs believe they are above-average teachers
- 96% of college students believe they have above-average social skills
- 19% of earners polled by TIME reported they were in the top 1% of earners
How’s that?