Students can deliberate the pros and cons of market economics and decision making in these cases, one involving food banks, the other involving terrorism. Food Banks’ Pickle: Getting Food To The Right Place At The Right Time (3:30 min. audio clip) discusses an efficient way to allocate food donations where needed most. And in Reviving Payoff For […]
Law professor Brian Leiter’s Why Tolerate Religion? (published in 2013) proposes three affirmative reasons. The reviewer agrees with Leiter’s third conclusion, but for legal reasons argues to deny the first two: 1) singling out religion and 2) granting religious exceptions: “It is difficult, however, to appreciate them if one reduces religion to just a matter of religious conscience.” […]
The New Dignity: Gnostic, Elitist, Self-Destructive Will-to-Power: “Human dignity is grounded in our ability to defy nature—to go beyond natural limitations and thereby create ourselves anew. But in a world with no clear origin, no purposeful end, and no intrinsic meaning, human dignity is founded on nothing more than a self-creating will to power that […]
Forensic Pseudoscience – The Unheralded Crisis of Criminal Justice: No human endeavor is completely without error, and one might wonder just how systemic the problems of forensic science truly are. The claim of crisis is far from universally shared. But the problem is therefore not that forensic science is wrong, but that it is hard to know when it […]
Conflicted Catharsis: On ISIS and Revenge Films: in movies and in life, should Christians celebrate when villains are killed? The police, the military, the enforcement agencies who preserve peace in the world—when they are not abused—are agents of temporal justice in a world desperately seeking shalom. The complication is that sin infects not just the […]
A new study by LifeWay Research shows that more than 4 in 10 women who have had an abortion were churchgoers when they ended a pregnancy. Only 7 percent of women discussed their abortion decision with anyone at church. Three-fourths say the church had no influence on their decision to terminate a pregnancy. Students can […]
Bread for the World Puts Price Tag on Hunger: $160 billion in health care. Hunger and food insecurity are so widespread in the United States they add $160 billion to national health care spending, according Bread for the World, Hunger is a key factor in the U.S. having the worst infant mortality rate among developed countries. The […]
Following public scrutiny of their previous policy, Grand Canyon University evaluated its employee benefits policy and, in order to demonstrate “grace and compassion” toward married same-sex employees, extended employee benefits to partners. GCU was founded by Southern Baptists in 1949, issued a statement last Friday explaining that the school has altered its employee benefits package to include lawfully married same-sex […]
In “The Illusion of Respectability,” Allen Guelzo challenges the professor or teacher who is Christian to renounce the lust for credibility in the modern academy. Otherwise, that environment changes us—substitutes its reward system, offers its hierarchy, and creates its parallel universe to which we are slowly acculturated. Accreditation and public funding are now discredit and indentured servitude.
In “My Top 5 Works of Religious Satire,” Terry Lindvall thinks back through his research to pick the 5 best books of religious satire. Students can be introduced to Erasmus, C.S. Lewis, Guareschi, Bierce, and Swift. His recent book, God Mocks, (NYU Press, 2015) traces the development of faith-based humor from biblical times through today.
