Featured Essay / Culture
The video for "The Cost of Freedom" event is now available. Cornel West and Robert George joined Rick Warren at Biola University for a discussion about disagreement, common ground, and justice. West and George are good friends, yet disagree on important issues. There is a lively discussion about halfway through as…
Essay / Politics
I love inaugurations, even when my candidate doesn’t win. I still have a marked-up newspaper copy of the first Clinton inaugural address in my files. Inauguration day is a great American event, and the high spirits surrounding the Obama inauguration take it to the next
Essay / Culture
It is hard to imagine, but 90 years ago, the Constitution was amended to make liquor illegal: no selling, manufacturing, or transporting beverage alcohol. If you look at all those progressive-era amendments to the Constitution, they’re all pretty interesting: 16th Amendment (1913): Federal Income Tax
Essay / Politics
In these complicated days of geopolitical confusion, here is a straightforward question: What does the Bible say abut the Arab people? It’s a clear enough question, but who do you know who could put together more than a few sentences on the subject? There must
Essay / Culture
Even though it’s a big political week and I’ve been consuming much more news and political analysis than is healthy, I happened to be thinking about something else on Monday. I was browsing century-old Los Angeles Times stories for a project, and found this intriguing
Essay / Culture
Citizens of the United States of America are quick to argue that they have constitutional rights – for everything. Citizens defend clearly expressed rights such as the right to free speech, the right to not be searched or seized unreasonably, and the right to peaceably
Essay / Literature
A selection from W. H. Auden, ‘The Poet & The City’, in The Dyer’s Hand and other essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 86-87 …to speak sense into politics. ‘There are two kinds of political issues, Party issues and Revolutionary issues. In a party issue,
Essay / Politics
How do you keep a healthy spiritual life during an intensely political time? The political season, after all, is about to begin in earnest: in only one week the Democrats will open their national convention in Denver, and shortly after that the Republicans will convene
Essay / Politics
John Piper has the right idea about Martin Luther King Day: Don’t Waste It. In a timely memo, Piper exhorted all pastors and teachers who read his blog to “take note of the day and speak a word of exhortation to your people concerning their
Essay / Culture
It’s World AIDS Day today. We tend to get faddish about issues. A buzz starts up about a particular need in the world, and many of us jump on a bandwagon of support, buying T-shirts and seeing movies and, sometimes, praying. Too often, our interest
Essay / Culture
Imagine a world where slavery is still a normal part of our daily lives. What if the North under Abraham Lincoln’s presidency assented to the demands of the Southern states and allowed for both the continuation of slavery and the creation of new slave states?
Essay / Politics
In a recent New York Times op-ed piece, David Brooks laments the ‘end of integration’. (Read the whole piece here.) Nothing is sadder than the waning dream of integration… Expecting integration, Americans find themselves confronting polarization and fragmentation. Amid all the problems that have made
Essay / Politics
John Mark Reynolds, 2004. Frequently, internet atheists argue that the American Constitution is a secular document. In one way, they are of course right. From a Christian point of view the Constitution governs the “secular authority.” It is for the City of Man and not