Book List

You are what your mind eats …

As the Angels in Heaven: A Theological Reflection on the Plight of Bruce Jenner

Long after his sordid story broke, we are still talking about Bruce Jenner.  His sad state fascinates us and brings many of our societal failures and follies to the surface.  Chief among them is our destructive devotion to the ultimacy of personal choice.  Devotion that borders on idolatry.

In this man's fractured life, we see the folly of making the subjective will ultimate. 

When a full-grown man says something like, "as far back as i can remember, i have felt like and identified as a woman," and we are unable to respond with anything but, "well, then you must really be a woman," we are in deep trouble.

Certain fundamental things precede memory.  Certain truths are objectively true about us - whether we prefer and identify with them or not.  Several of these objective truths of reality come by way of the body we're given. We receive our bodies, and therefore our genders, long before we possess anything like memory or feeling or a sense of identity or even any self awareness at all.
You show up at conception and there it is - already right there in your DNA from the first second of your life.  And centuries after you die, if archaeologists happen to dig up your bones, one of the first things they will determine by the most basic testing is whether you were male or female.

When we hear ourselves asking questions like - "Can you imagine being trapped in a body you don't belong in?" ... as if you could be switched at birth into a foreign body by accident or trickery... as if - because of its gender - your body were something you could be "trapped inside of" like an elevator in a blackout.

The Grave Importance of Church Funerals and Cemetery Yards

"[The problem is] not that our culture doesn't believe in God.  It's that our culture doesn't believe in death ... really.  And as a result, [we] don't really get the point.  Our culture is dedicated to distracting us from this inconvenient truth.  We are dedicated to being distracted from distraction by distraction."

- David Bentley Hart

Book List

You are what your mind eats …

The Cumulative Effect of Family Worship

"Family worship is an anchor and foundation for the rest of life.  When you sit with your family, read the Scriptures and pray together, you are giving them a touchstone they can relate to throughout their day and experiences.  It's not as if there's going to be direct one to one correspondence to what you talk about that day and what happened at school with their friends.  The effect is cumulative.  They don't remember what they had for dinner last Tuesday either.  But the effect in enabling them to grow is obvious.  ... You would never tell your family, 'I think we're just going to skip dinner tonight.' ... In the same way, the cumulative effect of teaching God's Word that informs their hearts and minds so that they can think Biblically and act Biblically as occasions arise in their lives... It is important to be consistent yet flexible."

- Timothy Witmer, professor of at Practical Theology at Westminster Seminary, 
author of The Shepherd Leader at Home

ADHD in Context

"I think that ADD is probably a necessary neurological adjustment to the all-at-once environment that we have.  This was Marshall McLuhan's prophetic awareness - to understand this.  ADD is a necessary adjustment."

- B.W. Powe

The Redemption of Bernard Nathanson

Few people, if any, did more than Bernard Nathanson to undermine the right to life of unborn children by turning abortion from an unspeakable crime into a constitutionally protected liberty. [And] someday, when our law is reformed to honor the dignity and protect the right to life of every member of the human family, including children in the womb, historians will observe that few people did more than Bernard Nathanson to achieve that reversal.

Dr. Nathanson, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology, had his first involvement with abortion arranging an illegal abortion for his girlfriend. Many years later, he [called it] his “introductory excursion into the satanic world of abortion.”

Nathanson became a nearly monomaniacal crusader for abortion. As Director of the Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health, he presided over more than 60,000 abortions and performed 5,000 himself [one of which included his own son or daughter inconveniently conceived out of wedlock].